There’s a quiet poise about Katia Luna Benaï that makes you lean in a little closer when you speak with her. A sculptor by trade, artist by instinct, and thinker by design, she might be softly spoken, but that belies a deeply felt dedication to the power of creativity. Through her eponymous studio she is committed to creating fine art pieces that seem to hum with history and feel both cerebral and deeply human.

Though born in London, Luna Benaï’s story begins further south in Algeria, where she was raised by her grandmother, in a household of proud Amazigh women. Amazigh, meaning “the free people,” are indigenous inhabitants of North Africa. In a world that once sought to erase them, they remain a civilization defined by their resilience and by a remarkable tradition of matriarchal strength. For Luna Benaï, that lineage is not merely heritage, “it’s something that I treasure so much to this day, and it’s really made the tapestry of who I am as a person.”

Case in point: The Atlas Box, a one-of-a-kind jewellery box commissioned by Tiffany Dubin. A feature of the Jewellery as Art sale at Sotheby’s, it preserves the artist’s 4,000-year-old heritage through geometric symbols of the Amazigh. The symbols are a marker of the Tamazight language, carved on to a rhombicuboctahedron, one of Archimedes’ infinity shapes, offered with a detailed jewel holding and traditional hand-painted details.

Through peaceful resistance, just like the Amazigh, Luna Benaï treasures the culture while adding to it her own modern perspective, delicately unearthing centuries-old stories and offering them up to new generations. It’s why she has started to bring her art to the Middle East. “It’s mostly about the community, the culture,” she explains. “It bridges over so many things, so it’s about getting to know the community in terms of the arts and artisanal work.”

Her rich backstory has often been a fertile ground from which her creativity has flourished. “My mother is a strong Muslim Amazigh woman, my father is a French Mediterranean academic, and my grandfather was an open-minded scholar in Algeria. We all complement each other,” Luna Benaï says of her childhood. It’s that co-existence between worlds and philosophies that has profoundly shaped both her identity and practice.

Luna Benaï approaches her design projects through the lens of architecture. Her debut collection, Artefacts, featured two sculptural handbags – Nyx and Zazia – each a wearable objet d’art bridging sculpture with fashion. Crafted in exotic leather, the pieces are tactile yet culturally tied to Greek mythology and the Amazigh bloodline. “Zaha Hadid has always been a huge inspiration,” reflects the artist. “Her ability to challenge physics through architecture – I like to implement that within my work. For in stance, with Object d’Arts, it wasn’t easy finding the right arti sans. It took 39 hours to make Nyx.”

For each piece Luna Benaï designs she begins with layers of cultural, historical, sometimes even psychological research, considering that her background includes an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience. “Psychology is infused in culture, and in getting to know people,” she says. Having experimented with different mediums throughout her career she admits that one of the things she enjoys most is the research. A self described bookworm, the artist reveals that “I go the more historical route, looking at cultural heritage. I have a modern take on how I execute the designs, but the research is very much old school.”

Before turning her creative focus to fine art Luna Benaï spent fifteen years in the fashion space. “I know a lot about the fashion industry. But I found my true identity whilst doing fine art and fusing everything together.” That fusion is something that reflects how the lines between fashion and art have blurred over the past few years, and it’s an arena the artist wants to investigate. “The fashion-adjacent collaborations with the art world are fascinating,” she confirms. “It’s something I’d love to explore further.”

 Luna Benaï’s growing recognition in the art world speaks for itself. “The biggest high was my launch,” she recalls. “When I got commissioned by Tiffany Dubin at Sotheby’s in New York. It was the first auction I had ever done, and I was pretty unknown, so it was a quite major moment for me.” Though nerves ran heavy at the time, what she decided to do afterwards was where she found herself to be the most fulfilled. She channelled 15% of the proceeds from that auction toward Hannan School, a grassroots charity that supports children’s education in Morocco. “We got to see the kids and the impact first-hand,” she says warmly. “They’re now working to build a secondary school so the children can apply for scholarships and university overseas. It’s nice when you can see where it’s actually going – that’s something I’m really proud of.”

For the artist, creativity and community go hand in hand. “When I started my company the whole point was to give back,” she says. “It’s definitely something I want to explore further – working very closely with women and children nonprofits. The Middle East really accommodates that because there’s so much here in terms of values.” Existing within the bespoke market, Luna Benaï advocates a slow, selective ecosystem. “I don’t push a lot of products out,” she says. “But I do like to experiment. What draws me in is the storytelling. I’m looking more on the community level right now, growing a story through that, and seeing how I can em phasise it.” That sense of shared narrative extends to everyone involved in her creative process and Luna Benaï, who sees herself as an introvert, tends to want to let her work speak for itself. “Once a project’s finished, I disappear. For me, it’s about seeing everybody happy, whoever I’m partnering up with. Or if it’s my own project, seeing the feedback and people’s reactions is enough.”

“I know a lot about the fashion industry. But I found my true identity whilst doing fine art and fusing everything together.”

 Her practice continues to expand both conceptually and materially, as she delves into new collaborations. “It’s really exciting to work with scent and taste for the first time,” she says of a new project she is currently working on, but that is still under wraps. “It’s explorative, and the team is amazing. Having creative flexibility is really important, too.” Today, London remains Luna Benaï’s base, but her compass increasingly points eastward. “A lot of my stuff gets made in Italy, but I’m looking to make it home grown and locally,” she says as she embarks on new creative partnerships within the Middle East. Her work, much like her heritage, exists in the space between: between London and Algiers, between tradition and modernity, between sculpture and storytelling. And it is this mélange of places, cultures and avenues of expression that truly give her designs their unique magnetic power.

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Images: Supplied & @luna_benai