A multidisciplinary storyteller
I'm Nefertiti Thomas — a multidisciplinary storyteller working in Los Angeles as a director, photographer, writer, and perfumer.
Every medium I work in answers the same question: how do we hold onto a life as it moves through us? Behind the camera, I've spent more than twenty-five years directing and photographing stories of interior lives. On the page, I write memoir, poetry, and short fiction. And through STORII, my literary fragrance house, I translate finished writing into scent — each fragrance released only alongside the text it was born from. My newest work, a series of devotional paintings turned into candles and anointing oils, carries that same translation practice into yet another medium.
The form changes; the practice doesn't. Everything here is one continuous archive of life, love, and my own human experience.
Art has been my outlet since childhood — a space for healing, mediation, and making sense of life as it unfolds. That hasn't changed. What's changed is what I do with it: the private practice became a body of work.
Some of what you'll find here was made in seasons of joy, some in seasons I had to survive. I've learned not to separate the two. Painting carried me through what writing couldn't yet say; writing caught what the camera missed; scent now holds what outlasts them both. Each portfolio on this site is a piece of that journey — life experienced, interpreted, and kept.
