Michal Petros
Eritrean-American Cultural Documentarian & Strategic Consultant
The Story Behind Studio Hiwet
This studio is named after my aunt Hiwet, who raised me to understand the value of art and civic engagement. Her early passing taught me something else: to create with intention and honor life by living it fully.
ሂወት / Hiwet means "life" in Tigrinya.
The logo’s double dots (፡፡) are the Ge'ez period—perceived as a double colon in English. This duality reflects the cultural fluency of diaspora experience: rooted in one script, read through another.
This is where I continue exploring identity, memory, and connection via image and story.
The Journey
This practice began in community spaces across continents—in Eswatini, where I supported health programs, and in NYC, where I built corporate engagement strategies by day and documented diaspora stories by night.
Studio Hiwet emerged from years of straddling worlds—corporate and creative, institutional and grassroots. I learned that meaningful cultural work requires both operational rigor and deep listening.
That documentation is itself strategy.
Today
Now, I partner with organizations to build cultural initiatives that honor community complexity—rooted in lived experience, sustained by strategic frameworks, and measured by genuine impact.
Cultural work matters too much to be done carelessly. Life—ሂወት—demands intention.