About
NIN9 Studios
NIN9 Studios is an independent creative production house at 44 Kallang Place, Singapore. Photography, film, live broadcast, and the styling, makeup and production support that goes with them, under one roof.
Founded in 2013 by Vinod Rai Sharma, thirty six years behind the lens. It began in seventy five square feet and occupies twelve hundred today.
The work spans more than thirty genres. Corporate and editorial commissions, executive portraits, weddings and family sittings, fashion and beauty, architecture and interiors, concerts and live music, theatre and film, product and brand campaigns, conferences and awards nights, diplomatic and government engagements. Some of it is public. A good deal of it is not, because part of what clients are buying is discretion.
In 2025 we built Singapore's first commercial NDI podcast studio, with multi camera, live graphics, virtual sets, teleprompting and full streaming. Broadcast grade video podcast production without the outside broadcast truck.
The studio runs lean by design. A network of specialist photographers, videographers, stylists and producers is assembled around each commission rather than kept on a payroll and fitted to it.
NIN9 wasn't designed as a brand. It was built as a studio, nail by nail, frame by frame, much of it by hand. Every project that comes through the door joins that record.
Meet the Founder
Vinod Rai Sharma
The Man Behind the Lens
Every photograph is an argument about what deserved to be kept.
Vinod Rai Sharma has been making it since he was ten, when he built a pinhole camera by hand because the cameras in the house were not his to touch. The break came six years later: at sixteen, paid to photograph Amitabh Bachchan. Thirty years after that he photographed Bachchan's son. Abhishek posted the picture himself, the subject for once doing the archiving.
The rooms have been of a particular kind. Heads of state across four Singapore visits, on commission from the High Commission of India; Dr S. Jaishankar and Vivian Balakrishnan in 2019, two governments in one day. Both 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Kailash Satyarthi in 2019 and Malala Yousafzai in 2024, one of very few photographers anywhere to have documented both. Carlos Santana from the front of the stage. Manoj Bajpayee against the CBD skyline for SGIFF. Zakir Hussain in August 2024, four months before he died: a photograph that was not a memorial when it was made and is one now.
That is the condition of the medium: it does not know what it is recording. On 8 December 2013 he was inside a temple on Chander Road photographing a wedding when the Little India riots broke out below. He climbed six floors to the roof and worked until the street went quiet. The pictures ran next morning in The Online Citizen, part of the primary visual record of the worst civil disturbance in Singapore in forty-four years.
The trust runs the other way too, into rooms where nothing is burning: in March 2025, the private farewell of Piyush Gupta after sixteen years running DBS. Such commissions are not won on a portfolio.
The work has appeared in Tatler Asia, NBC's TODAY, Kirkus Reviews, SilverKris and on two covers of India Se. Jim Frazier, Academy Award for Technical Achievement, cinematographer to David Attenborough, said of the studio that he could not equal the work being done inside it.
NIN9 Studios opened in 2013 in seventy-five square feet, on his mother's birthday. It occupies twelve hundred in Kallang now, with his wife Audrey Bernadette Christee as creative partner, and holds Singapore's first commercial podcast studio, where Naval Ravikant sat down with Ranveer Allahbadia. In July 2026 it took GEC East at the Mandarin Oriental: a president, a first lady, a former prime minister. Again on his mother's birthday.
Thirty genres, thirty-six years, one instruction underneath all of it. Fame arrives pre-photographed; the work is to get beneath it. What he is after is the glint in the eyes, the half-second when the performance drops. Stature is the context, not the point.
Portraits, corporate and editorial commissions, live events and film. Studio in Kallang.
Audrey Bernadette christee
The Heart Behind the Brand
Almost nobody is comfortable being photographed. The camera asks a person to be looked at and to appear unaware of it at the same time, which is not a natural thing to do.
Audrey Bernadette Christee spends her working life on that problem.
She wanted mass communication as a teenager and found something close to it in school theatre and choir. When the choir she wanted did not exist, she and her sister built one at their church. The pattern held.
The years that followed were spent in early childhood education, moving from teacher to senior teacher to principal, with formal recognition for her contribution to the field. A room of small children has to be read continuously. Nothing in it can be forced.
Then pageantry, as a competitor rather than an observer. She walked the stage herself and finished first runner up, which is to say she learned the discipline from the inside, under the lights, with a result attached. Later she coached others through it, among them a Miss Universe contestant.
Makeup and styling came out of all of it. An eye shaped by theatre, by pageant stages, and by two decades of working with people at the moment they are most exposed.
In 2022 she joined NIN9 Studios as creative partner and led the revision of its direction, identity and commercial offering.
What she does on a shoot is not only a look. It is the twenty minutes before the first frame, in which a person stops performing composure and simply has it. Clients arrive nervous. They tend not to leave that way.
Every photograph needs light. Audrey makes sure there is someone ready inside it.
Testimonials
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