Hadeel Osman, Creative Director, Stylist, and founder of DAVU Studio i Sudan at 29. Hadeel Osman has over seven years of experience in the media and fashion industries.
Early years
Her creative inspiration stems from her years raised in the United Arab Emirates and living in Malaysia. When she decided to return to Sudan in 2016, her career painted a complicated but optimistic picture. “Sudan is a very interesting and a difficult nation to create in. Coming here, it was hard to find raw inspiration from the streets. With a very controlling regime, limited resources and a never-ending economic crisis, life was very dim and colors were nowhere in sight,” she tells Forbes Africa. This allowed her to come up with the name of her business, DAVU, which stands for ‘designing a visual utopia’. It is a multi-disciplinary creative studio that fuses design, art, education and sustainability. “I also wanted to contribute to the arts and culture scene of my country, which has fallen under the radar both locally in the commercial sphere and regionally across the continent,” she says. She has worked on several projects with clients in Dubai, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Sudan to enhance their branding strategies.
DAVU Studio offers an array of creative services in the form of art and creative direction, concept development, branding, styling and most importantly, informal education through interactive, immersive and creative workshops. Through this, she has had the opportunity to work with Sudanese visual artists and designers, and was commissioned by the Sudan Independent Film Festival to train costume designers, jewelry designers and filmmakers. Being a creative on a mission to change the outlook of her country, she has also dedicated the remainder of her career to uplifting Sudan in the creative field and Africa as a frontier of the world’s art and culture. Osman believes with the recent revolution, the future looks bright as she hopes to create a Sudan chapter of the Fashion Revolution organization, designing a suitable gender-neutral, capsule fashion collection inspired by traditional Sudanese design aesthetics.
