Elizabeth W. Giorgis is a Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at The Africa Institute. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University (2010) and her Masters in Museum Studies from New York University (2004). She served as 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 the author of several publications and a member of the editorial board for Transition Magazine, Northeast African Studies Journal (NEAS), ARTmargins and Critical African Studies, 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), Callaloo Art, and contributing editor for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME).
She is a recipient of several fellowships including the Ali Mazrui Senior Fellowship for Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Brown University, a Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, and a fellow at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Resident Fellows Program in Italy. Her book, "Modernist Art in Ethiopia" (2019, Ohio University Press), stands as the first comprehensive monographic study of Ethiopian visual modernism, situated within a broader social and intellectual context. Shortlisted for the African Studies Association UK Fage and Oliver Prize and a finalist for the African Studies Association Best Book Prize, it ultimately secured the African Studies Association’s 2020 Bethwell A. Ogbot Book Prize for the best book on East African Studies.
She served as a faculty member for MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia), a Getty Foundation grant, held in Hong Kong in August 2019 and Dhaka, Bangladesh in February 2020. In January 2019, she served as convener for the first African Humanities Initiative called “Africa as Concept: Decolonization, Emancipation and Freedom” which was sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Consortium of the Humanities, Centers and Institutes (CHCI).
She has curated several exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center, more recently, the works of Danish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. She has also participated in several international conferences and public lectures.
Her recent research focused on the representation of Ethiopian women in the wider politics of exclusion which was completed as a manuscript in September 2023.
Her recent exhibition with the Sharjah Art Foundation, “Henok Melkamzer: Telsem Symbols and Imagery,” (February - June 2024) explored the Ethiopian art form of “telsem” that interweaves symbols, drawings and texts imbued with spiritual and philosophical significance. She argued that is part of the modernist canon but as an art form that is excluded from the modernist narrative.