Connection to Identity: xN Studio's Nasozi Kakembo on Supporting Artisans, Preserving Legacies, and Creating Sustainable Livelihoods
By Julia Gamolina
Nasozi Kakembo is the founder of xN Studio (“Lifestyle—Without Borders”), a multi-disciplinary design company she founded in 2011 in Brooklyn, NY and Kampala, Uganda. She describes it as “a design bridge between my East African heritage and my American upbringing,” which also allows her to weave her studies in architecture, art history, and urban planning into her independent career.
She spent over ten years in the international development field, traveling and working throughout Africa, Europe, and parts of the Caribbean and South America. xN Studio works exclusively with artisans throughout Africa and pulls from these experiences to form a culturally aware and ethical decor and lifestyle brand that prioritizes a social impact-oriented mission. Traditional and timeworn textiles and techniques are the foundation of all of xN’s collections, and from there, Nasozi and artisans modify the applications and functions to suit a modern and borderless lifestyle. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Nasozi talks about founding her business to support African artisans, advising those just starting their careers to intentionally seek out all kinds of mentors.
Tell me about your foundational years - where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., and I look back on those years with joy. I really had an idyllic childhood. My neighborhood was a relatively tight-knit apartment complex that had families coming from all over the world who were settling in the U.S. for the first time, and often from places where there was civil conflict. I was exposed to a variety of cultures and languages from a very young age — including my own very multicultural family, as my mother is Black-American from Boston with roots in the South, my father is Ugandan, and they met in Germany — and this was reflected in all aspects of my community. I never felt like a “minority” because my community, from our local leaders to the principals in my schools, was not homogenous.
I credit growing up in a truly diverse community with my ability to navigate various cultures and situations, and to also feel comfortable and confident wherever I choose to go, both within the U.S. and abroad — I traveled to my 41st country, Zimbabwe, this summer! In addition to growing up in a very multicultural home, I also grew up surrounded by the arts and my Ugandan culture. My mother worked in an African art gallery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., and often took me to her various weekend work events and other cultural events in the D.C. area. There was also an influx of Ugandan immigrants into D.C. at that time, so I grew up very connected to this part of my identity as well.
Nasozi and her translator Mohammed headed to a rug weaving cooperative in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, June 2022.
Nasozi's camera crew and textile artisan during her book research visit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in June 2022.
You eventually studied urban planning! How did this come about, and what did you learn?
I wanted to be an architect from as early as I can remember. As I began to travel more however, to Uganda in particular, I started to notice that there were certain differences in how I lived compared to my cousins there. For example, they didn’t have plumbing or electricity at our large, well-built home just outside of the capital. Without judgment or assumption, I plainly couldn’t understand why, especially in such a resource-rich country such as Uganda.
This was almost twenty years ago and a lot has changed since then, but this was the reality I encountered when I started traveling to Uganda as a teen. I had it in the back of my mind that I somehow wanted to use architecture to make social and development changes. I remember I was on the A train on my way to Columbia University to pick up my M. Arch application, and happened to pick up the student publication from the urban planning program. I began reading the magazine on the way back to my Brooklyn apartment, and the more I read, the more I felt like this particular discipline would give me the tools and the framework I needed to understand those questions I had as a teenager, and to also resolve them. So I applied to Columbia’s urban planning program, and once I was accepted to that program, I set out on my plan for a path to make a big difference — grandiose, I know!
“I want to use my work to create dignified and sustainable livelihoods for African artisans and their families...Success to me looks like the alleviation of poverty through work that also preserves our cultural artistic traditions.”
Without those grandiose ideas though, change would happen a lot slower than we need it to — so kudos! After Columbia then, how did you get your start in working with the built environment?
I moved to New York City with the plan of working in an architecture firm for one year and then going to graduate school in architecture. I mostly stuck to that plan. I worked for two incredible firms over the course of that first year, and although I was working mostly on the administrative side, I began to understand the fascinating world of civic and institutional architecture, including master plans and public spaces, and NYC architecture and design.
I worked on proposals for the The High Line and Post-9/11 Fulton Street Redevelopment, which are now part of the city’s DNA. My behind-the-scenes involvement still gives me a tremendous sense of pride having learned about this great city from that particular perspective and experience.
How did xN Studio come to be from these experiences?
I never had any intention or desire to work for myself. I was enamored by the idea of working for a large international organization and likely spending my entire life and career overseas. After graduate school, I worked in human rights and social justice philanthropy for four years, and it was during that time that I founded my home décor brand, xN Studio, really as a hobby side-hustle.
Some of the drive for this was that my non-profit salary was meager, despite having generous perks, and from a practical standpoint, I needed to find a way to make more money. But I also found myself missing the visual and creative arts, and was actively trying to find a way to engage in those in a meaningful way again. I was living in Brooklyn, so I was never short of creative inspiration, but it wasn’t until a business trip to Dakar that I realized how I could combine both what I wanted and needed as a working mother. This was in 2011, and my son was two-years-old at the time. I came back to New York knowing exactly how I could combine my love for residential design and interiors, my heritage, plus make some extra money—I would start a home décor business! As my side business slowly began to grow, I also wasn’t feeling challenged or recognized in my nine-to-five. So two years after Dakar, I decided to leave my comfortable career path in philanthropy for something a little less certain but markedly more rewarding.
Since then, my work has evolved from being primarily products designed and made by artisans, to products also incorporating my own contemporary designs, though still drawn from traditional techniques such as batik and woodcarving. I feel like this is what continues to set my brand apart from others who have entered the African décor and interiors space over the past decade.
Nasozi with basket artisans in Uganda, July 2022.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback?
The biggest challenge for me in the beginning was that elevated African décor was newer to the national retail industry. I remember pitching my work to carefully selected stores, mostly in NYC and California, and shop owners would more-or-less turn their nose up at me and tell me that the work wasn’t a fit, or I just wouldn’t get a response. Many of those stores ended up carrying African décor or African-inspired décor months or years later, once it had gained wider prominence.
I never gave up because I truly believe in the value of what I am doing. Having a brand that represents my heritage in such a beautiful and unapologetic way was also never truly about me. I could never imagine telling my artisan partners in Uganda, for example, that I stopped because I was having a rough patch. It’s purely not an option, and they need me just as much as I need them, but I am in a position to access more business resources, customers, and growth opportunities. So I keep going despite whatever the challenge may be.
Where are you in your career today? What is on your mind most at the moment?
I’m writing a book! That is by far what I’m most excited about right now. I just returned from two months in Africa where I traveled to Morocco, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe meeting with artisans. I met with some for the first time, and others who I’ve been working with for years but hadn’t been able to meet in person because of the pandemic. During the course of my interviews and travels, I became more committed to ensuring that artisans in Africa, and ultimately globally, get their due both monetarily and as it relates to recognition. I go into depth about this in the book, but I also plan on building out a consultancy that works with corporations to ensure that their marketing and branding of artisan-based or artisan-influenced goods reflects ethical principles from the outset. So I’m excited about building that out, too.
“...find a mentor — or two, or three! It doesn’t have to be someone who looks like you, and it doesn’t even have to be another woman. But do find someone you trust who has more experience than you and whose career path you find similar to the goals you have set out for yourself.”
Who are you admiring now and why?
I am admiring my friend Doreen Adengo, who passed away just a few weeks ago from cancer. She was a Ugandan-American architect who studied at Catholic University and Yale. She worked in NYC for many years, and went on to found her own progressive architecture firm in Kampala, Uganda in 2016 called Adengo Architecture. Even from that era, I admired how she was “reversing Brain Drain,” by going back to Uganda and using what she learned during her studies and career in the U.S. to introduce fresh ideas to Uganda architecture, which was becoming less environmentally sustainable, and quite frankly, more gaudy.
Doreen was a champion of African Modernism, which is the design approach at the basis of my own design practice. African modernism started during the post-colonial era and was meant to signal a new era of societal innovation and freedom. African designers collaborated with European ones to produce an architecture that was responsive to the tropical climate as well as the growing needs of a new country. Several of these buildings still stand in Kampala today, and Doreen meticulously documented them in some of her work. I revisited several of them when I was in Kampala in July, which was unfortunately also when she passed away. I am committed to preserving her legacy one way or another. She was really on to something incredible.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
I want to use my work to create dignified and sustainable livelihoods for African artisans and their families. I truly believe that there are enough resources for everyone without inconveniencing anyone else, but these resources, and access to them, are not distributed fairly. Success to me looks like the alleviation of poverty through work that also preserves our cultural artistic traditions. I don’t think that one’s worth is based on work, but the artisans I work with truly love what they do, as do I, so it doesn’t actually feel like work most of the time!
Expert woodcarver and budding electrical engineer, Amissi, works on an order of trivets for xN Studio August 2022.
Suubi School just outside of Kampala, Uganda, is xN Studio's partner school. This was Nasozi's first visit since the pandemic, August 2022.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
My advice for those starting their career, in general but also especially for women, is to find a mentor — or two, or three! This doesn’t have to be a formal arrangement by any means. It doesn’t have to be someone who looks like you, and it doesn’t even have to be another woman. But do find someone you trust who has more experience than you and whose career path you find similar to the goals you have set out for yourself. You might not even be at the place where you have defined these goals, and that’s okay, too, since having these relationships will expand your ideas of what is possible.
There are so many things I learned along the way that could have saved me precious time and energy had I simply known. I was also a new mother as soon as I went to work after graduate school, so I was very short on both of those things! One of those things I can’t get back is all of the money I left on the table by not negotiating harder, or even being aware of what my skills and experience were worth on the job market as an employee. I feel like those conversations are more transparent now, and even required by law in New York State now, but there were no open or comfortable conversations about compensation when I started out. I also just never asked, and it’s true what they say—closed mouths don’t get fed.