Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow
Elizabeth W. Giorgis received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University in 2010 and her master’s degree in Museum Studies from New York University in 2004. She has served as director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, dean of the College of Performing and Visual Arts, and director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University. She is the author of several publications and a member of the editorial boards of Transition Magazine, Northeast African Studies (NEAS), and the Ethiopian Journal of Social Science and Humanities (EJOSSAH). She is also an advisory editorial board member for the Journal for Critical African Studies (JCAS) and Callaloo Art, and a contributing editor for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME).
In addition to receiving the Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellowship in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, she has held several fellowships and academic appointments, including distinguished visiting scholar at Brown University, visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program in Italy.
Her book, Modernist Art in Ethiopia (Ohio University Press, 2019), is the first comprehensive monographic study of Ethiopian visual modernism within its broader social and intellectual history. It was shortlisted for the African Studies Association of the UK’s Fage & Oliver Prize for outstanding and original scholarship on Africa and was a finalist for the African Studies Association Best Book Prize, formerly known as the Melville J. Herskovits Prize. It also received the African Studies Association’s 2020 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize for the best book on East African studies.
