Sheila Nakitende is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher based in Kampala, Uganda. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Fine Art and Design from Makerere University in 2005.
Her artistic experience ranges from concept development, product and graphics design to gallery curatorial practice, coordinating arts projects, participating in local and international art workshops, residencies and exhibitions.
Having experimented with painting before exploring installation, performance and sculpture, Nakitende’s current practice focuses on womanhood, especially on experiences that include nurturing, material culture and methodological history while addressing current influences, challenges and transformations. She works with indigenous knowledge through engaging techniques such as weaving, stitching, burning and hand papermaking.
A Prince Claus Fund Cycle 4 CAREC Fellows Awardee in 2025 and recipient of the Parent residency grant at Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, USA 2017, Nakitende participated in the Kampala Art Biennale and Kampala Art Auction in 2016.
Her solo exhibitions include “ABAANA Ba KINTU” at Chemistry Laboratory Makerere University Kampala, Uganda in 2022, “TROPIKA” at Women’s Studio Workshop New York in 2017 and “40 TWISTS” at @rtpunch Studio Kampala, Uganda in 2013.
In 2022, her work was exhibited in “Magical Hackerism or Elasticity of Resilience” at Savvy Contemporary Berlin, “Those Beings Be Not Being” exhibition at alpha nova & galerie futura Berlin, and “The Forest and Desert School Revisited” at Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi Kenya.
Nakitende participated in a duo exhibition “She That Spreads the Winds” at Gallery Brulhart Geneva Switzerland in 2023 and presented at AKAA Fair 2023 in Paris France. Her work was exhibited in “BARK RHYTHMS, Contemporary Innovations & Ancestral Traditions” at the Robert. C. Williams Museum of Papermaking Atlanta, USA in 2024.
Nakitende’s artwork is included in private and public collections such as the Buganda Kingdom Museum collection in Uganda, National Gallery of Zimbabwe and Feminist Foundation for African Contemporary Art Geneva in Switzerland.
During her residency at Wereldmuseum Leiden, Sheila Nakitende will engage with the museum’s collection of bark cloth. Looking into how bark cloth has been collected, archived, and interpreted in the past, she is pursuing a reflection on its material, historical, artistic, cultural, and ecological meanings as well as its possibilities for the future. Previously in conversation with Metro54’s program Sustaining the Otherwise, her research explores the materiality of bark cloth and other organic materials, such as raffia and banana fibre, as a site of relationship between humans, environment, and memory.
