Elizabeth W. Giorgis

Biography

Elizabeth W. Giorgis is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at The Africa Institute. She was the director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, the Dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art and the director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University.

She is also a member of the editorial board for Transition Magazine, Northeast African Studies journal (NEAS) and the Ethiopian Journal of Social Science and Humanities (EJOSSAH). She is an advisory editorial board member for the Journal for Critical African Studies (JCAS), Callaloo Art and contributing editor for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME).

She served as convener for the first African Humanities Initiative, Africa as Concept: Decolonization, Emancipation and Freedom (2019), sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Consortium of the Humanities, Centers and Institutes (CHCI). Her current research is focused on Ethiopian women’s aesthetic in the wider politics of exclusion.

Giorgis is the author of several publications, including Unheard Voices: Contestations Over Representation for a collaborative project between SOAS and University of Addis Ababa called ‘Parliament for People’ and Modernist Art in Ethiopia (Ohio University Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the African Studies Association UK Fage and Oliver Prize for outstanding and original scholarship on Africa. It was also a finalist for the African Studies Association Best Book Prize. It won the African Studies Association’s Bethwell A. Ogbot Book Prize as the best book on East African Studies (2020).

She is a recipient of several fellowships, including the Ali Mazrui Senior Fellowship for Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah; Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Brown University; Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna; and a fellow at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Academic Writing Resident Fellows Programme, Italy.

Giorgis earned a master’s degree in Museum Studies from New York University (2004) and a PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University (2010).

She was born in Addis Ababa, where she currently lives and works.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2021 and 2022