For a long time, the conversation around creative work in Uganda has split cleanly into two lanes that rarely talk to each other: the art itself, and the business of surviving on it.
Artists learn to write, perform, design, and build an audience, often brilliantly, while the legal and business side of a creative career gets treated as an afterthought, something to figure out later, if at all. That gap is expensive.
It shows up as unclear contracts, unregistered work, split songs nobody agreed to in writing, and creative businesses that never become fundable because no one ever built the paperwork underneath them.
@augandanartist exists to close that gap. How you may ask?
This is a platform for Uganda’s creative and cultural industries. It is for musicians, visual artists, designers, filmmakers, and performers building careers across the country.
It exists to do two things at once, because in practice they can’t really be separated: celebrate the work being made, and make the business and legal realities behind that work legible, practical, and a little less intimidating. (Make sure you check out some of the Articles we have uploaded)
What lives here?
Spotlights on Ugandan creatives: Profiles of working artists across disciplines. We celebrate their process, their journey, and the lessons they’ve picked up building a creative career in Uganda specifically, not imported from somewhere else.
Plain-language legal and business education: Breakdowns of the questions almost every creative eventually runs into like, “Who owns a collaboration when nothing was signed?”, “What a management contract should actually protect”, “What it means to formalize a creative practice into a real business”, “”How fan data and ticket sales intersect with data protection law”, and what “investment-ready” concretely requires. We write these articles to be understood on a first read and we ground them in actual Ugandan statute rather than general advice borrowed from elsewhere.
A pulse on the sector: Policy shifts, funding opportunities, and developments relevant to anyone building a creative career here — the kind of information that’s easy to miss if you’re focused on the work itself, which is exactly as it should be.
Who’s behind it?
@augandanartist is curated by Isabel Twongyeirwe, an advocate and the founder of SHEVA Holdings, a legal and business advisory firm built specifically for Uganda’s creative and cultural industries. This platform is where SHEVA’s commitment to education and accessible sector knowledge lives in public; the parts of the work built to be shared rather than gatekept.
Isabel is also a working musician and recording artist in her own right, which is really the reason this platform exists at all. The perspective behind augandanartist isn’t that of a lawyer observing the creative sector from a distance but one built by someone who has sat on both sides of the table; as a creative navigating the same uncertainties, and as the advocate creatives eventually turn to once those uncertainties become expensive to ignore.
How all this fits together?
The goal is simple, even if the sector’s challenges aren’t. We are about the establishment of a dependable legal and business infrastructure in a Ugandan creative economy where the art and the infrastructure underneath it are taken equally seriously, and where good legal and business knowledge is something every artist has access to, not something only the well-connected or well-funded stumble into eventually.
Know an artist we should feature, or a question you keep running into that deserves a plain-language answer? Get in touch! This platform grows one story and one clarified question at a time.
augandanartist.com 