Estelle Yomeda, trained in art history and with a degree in visual arts, is a French-Togolese designer and artist based in Paris, France. Yomeda began her career in the Studio Chaussure of Yves Saint-Laurent after studying visual arts at the University of Strasbourg, and artistic crafts within from the Costume Workshops of the Opéra du Rhin. Afropean, Yomeda takes a transversal and generous look at design and freely combines multi-cultural traditions and innovations, materials and colors. Her artistic process is based on discoveries of ancestral knowledge and human encounters with craft people. This ethic feeds her creativity and leads her to launch, in 2018, her design studio Kente Project, through which she creates limited editions and unique works. Its name comes from its discovery of Kente, a traditional weaving that has spanned the centuries to establish itself as the identity and symbolic fabric of Togo and Ghana. Yomeda materialized her first collection of furniture in 2021, inspired by Togolese craftsmanship and the long tradition of French decorative arts .
Fully handmade, Yomeda's signature works are sculptural furniture pieces, made of solid Togolese wood of an extraordinary beauty, characterized by their tactile quality and sensual silhouettes, reflecting the expertise of Togolese craftspeople. Highly organic, Yomeda's sculptural furniture pieces appear loaded with life and animistic presence. Yomeda's use of local Togolese wood species, such as Mélina, Neem or Cassia, are chosen for their sustainability, offering her tactile works a natural warm polychromy. Setting out to meet the artisans of Lomé, Estelle Yomeda is exploring the crossing of knowledge and intercultural exchanges, interweaving trans-generational memories and ancestral techniques, to transform pieces of furniture into contemporary relics.
Estelle Yomeda will take part in the group exhibition Design in West Africa-Unity in Multiplicity at the Palais de Lomé in Togo, running from November 28 2025 through March 2026. Yomeda will present her first solo exhibition in France, Animal Vegetal, at Galerie Maria Wettergren, from November 6, 2025, to January 17, 2026.