Nicole Hénusse

Who is speaking

Art direction that starts from substance.

Nicole Hénusse has drawn since childhood. She trained in a private art studio, then at a specialist art school: she is a fine artist and illustrator first. In her graduating year she won the 2D image stream of the Image-Video Competition run by the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, and the press reported on it. She received the Hong Kong Most Outstanding Visual Art Student Award, and her work was exhibited at the Central Library in Hong Kong, the city’s largest library. Design came later, at the PolyU School of Design in Hong Kong, one of the twenty-five best art and design schools in the QS world ranking by subject, 2026 edition: typography and layout, software, brand identity. There she earned her BA Design and received the Talent Development Scholarship of the Hong Kong government, culture, arts and design stream, and served as art director and executive editor of the university’s Student Press Committee. She then took that way of looking outside the studio, with an MA in Social Anthropology and Visual Ethnography at the University of Kent, and a master’s degree in political science at the Université libre de Bruxelles. That sequence shapes the way she works: look at a subject in its context for a long time, then make an image that holds without a caption.

At HENUSSE she leads the market study, the search for a defensible edge and the copywriting strategy ahead of a website, then the visual identity that carries them. The Uzukuri line in the Protac catalogue, told on the Website build page, comes from that work.

Verifiable references

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Under her maiden name, Nicole Au Yeung, she was a finalist in the COPIC AWARD for The Lovers, and shortlisted for the Hong Kong Human Rights Art Prize. Her images have been exhibited at the Goethe-Gallery in Hong Kong, at Momijiya Honkan in Kyoto and at Loft, Metro City, in Shanghai, as well as in Illustrating Anthropology, an online exhibition in the United Kingdom supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute. She is also the author of a paper on animated illustration as a language, presented in the United Kingdom at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Conference.

nicolehenusse.be: her work as an illustrator and author, and the identities she has designed, including those of the house’s three properties.

The pieces behind these distinctions are in the archives on nicolehenusse.be.

With Théo, she also wrote two illustrated books: Our Species Appropriate Diet: Tiger’s Mystery in Lionland (2023) and The Truth About Our Plates: Tigrette & Lionard Tales (2025), written together, drawn by Nicole alone, published under her maiden name, Nicole Au Yeung. Her author page gathers them.