Mihret Kebede

Mihret Kebede is a multidisciplinary artist and poet whose research-based practice engages poetry, sound, and visual culture. She co-founded the Tobiya Poetic Jazz series, the Netsa Art Village Artists Collective, and the Addis Video Art Festival. Her work spans local and international exhibitions, workshops, performances, and collaborative projects, alongside organizing major art events and festivals. In 2013, she received a certificate award from the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture and Tourism in recognition of her contribution to the cultural sector.
Her work appears in key publications including Wax and Gold: Poetry Jazz, Stille Macht, Modernist Art in Ethiopia, as well as journals such as Washington Square Review, Poetry
International, Lyrikline, World Literature Today, Lichtungen, Circumference Magazine, and others. Her poetry is also featured in Songs We Learn from Trees, the first anthology of Amharic
poetry in English.

Her recent bilingual (Amharic/English) collection, #evolutionarypoems, developed as part of her PhD research, responds to Ethiopia’s political developments over the past seven years and was published by Circumference Books.

She is currently a PhD in Practice candidate in artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts
Vienna.

Helen Zeru

Helen Zeru b. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Helen Zeru is a multimedia visual artist whose practice engages installation, video,
performance, and research-based processes to explore embodiment, spirituality, ecology, and the politics of space. Rooted in critical inquiry and material experimentation, her work reflects on the social and metaphysical dimensions of care, support system, vulnerability, resilience in community, and collective memory.
Zeru received a Master of Arts in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute in 2017 and a Bachelor
of Fine Art from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in 2008.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including HFBK university in Hamburg92026), Future nows at Neue national gallery Berlin(2025), the Stellenbosch Triennale,
South Africa (2025); Modern Art Museum Addis Ababa (2020); Ecologies of Darkness at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019); African Humanities at Gebrekirstos Desta Center, Addis Ababa;
Dak’Art Off (2018) at Atelier Céramiques Almadies; Works of Mercy and The Vulnerable Body at CBK Zuidoost; Wiener Festwochen (2017); Kauru African Contemporary Art; IVAHM New Media Arts Festival; Kabbo Ka Muwala (The Girl’s Basket) at Makerere University; the Addis Video Art Festival; Neue Nationalgalerie; In Between Concrete (Entre Concreto) at TEOR/éTica, curated by Inti Guerrero; KLA Art Festival; and Travelling Communiqué at the Yugoslav Museum of History.

Zeru’s work continues to contribute to critical contemporary art discourses across Africa and internationally.

Kibrom Gebremedhin

Kibrom Gebremdhin Araya (born 1982,) is an Ethiopian Artist and Art Educator who lives and works in New York. Starting from 2008 he worked as a lecturer at the Addis Ababa University Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in the Department of Art Education. In 2016 he graduated with an MFA in Fine Arts from the same school, where he also coordinated this program in the 2017 and 2018 academic years. 

As someone who has recently relocated, Kibrom’s work focuses on the idea of history, personal and collective memories, and daily social experiences that he observes in his surroundings.

Kibrom primarily uses painting as his medium for his artwork, but he also incorporates drawing and animation. Throughout his career, he has exhibited and participated in various solo and group shows, including a recent traveling group show titled “States of Becoming” at The African Center and through U.S.A.

Hagere Selam Zegeye-Gebrehiwot

Hagere Selam Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is an artist, film programmer and writer.

Chiara Cartuccia

Betelhem Makonnen

Betelhem Makonnen is a conceptual artist interested in the perennial questions of existence. Through her work, she investigates the relationship between elements usually perceived as contradictory using as a platform her own personal experiences in constant dialogue with the findings of her daily practice of observation, reading and wandering. She has exhibited internationally at galleries, festivals and cultural centers, most recently at the Centro Cultural do Brasil RJ (2015), Casa Daros (2014), DakArt Off Senegal (2014), and the Prix Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand France (2014).

She was born in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia (1972), educated mostly in the United States and currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Austin, Texas.

Ng'endo Mukii

Ng'endo Mukii is an Annie award-winning and British Animation Award nominated film director. She is most well known for ‘Enkai,’ an episode on the Disney+ animated anthology, Kizazi Moto.

At the prestigious Design Indaba conference in South Africa, she presented her talk
‘Film Taxidermy and Re-Animation,’ proposing the use of animation as a means of re-humanizing the ‘indigenous’ image; a people whose ‘real’ image is burdened with stereotypes of being the ‘Other.’


Ng’endo is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and holds a Master of Arts in Animation from the Royal College of Art in London. She is an alumni of the beautiful Berlinale Talents, the distinguished Urucu Media REALNESS Screenwriter’s Residency (South Africa), and the incredible Goethe Institute Bahia Vila Sul artists’ residency (Brazil).
Her mixed-media and inter-genre approach to filmmaking, particularly focused on the experiences of African women, gives her an incredibly unique visual language and makes her a preeminent voice in animation.

She lives and works in Boston, as a Professor of the Practice at The Museum School (SMFA) at TUFTS University.

Dagrun Adalsteinsdottir

Dagrún Aðalsteinsdóttir (b. 1989 in Iceland) works in various mediums from performances and videos to collage drawings. Her work is an attempt to use personal or fictional scenarious and narratives to be in dialogue with how personal value versus collective value can overlap within the context of a cultural production.

Dagrún graduated in the year 2016 with M.A degree in Fine Art from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, a partner institute with Goldsmiths University in London. Dagrún works in collaboration with artists in Europe and Asia, organizing, writing and curating projects in collaboration with contemporary art institutions as well as artist run spaces.

Dagrún has exhibited her work in Xiamen and Shanghai China, Basel Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Manila Philippines as well as taking part in various group and solo exhibitions in Iceland. In 2015 she was selected to be part of the Icelandic biennale Sequences VII curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, creative director of Mostyn. In start of 2016 she was chosen to be part of the project Night Transmissions curated by Margot Norton, associate curator at The New Museum, where video works by 38 international artists were broadcasted on the Icelandic National Broadcast Service, Television Channel RÚV.

Currently she is curating and participating in a project called Professional Amateur opening this summer in Kling and Bang Gallery in Reykjavík, Iceland and later this year with ABC Klubhuis in Antwerp, Belgium.

Ezra Wube

Ezra Wube (born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is a cross-disciplinary artist who lives and works in New York. His works encompass video, drawing, painting, and installations. His work explores experiences of mobility, the malleability of time and place, and the dialogical tensions between "here" and "there", a confluence of prior and current influences on social idealism, pluralism, and autonomy. His exhibitions include the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial. Sesc_Videobrasil, Brazil; The 2nd edition of the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans, France; “Gwangju Biennale”, Gwangju, South Korea; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, Art in General, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; “Dak’Art Biennale”, Dakar, Senegal, The High Line, and Time Square Arts Midnight Moment, NY. His residencies, commissions, and awards include Michael Richards Visual Arts Award, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY, NY, Smack Mellon Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Work Space, LMCC Residency Program, New York, NY; Open Sessions Program, The Drawing Center, New York, NY; The Africa Center, NY; The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, NY; Museum of the Moving Images, Queens, NY; Rema Hort Mann Foundation; the Triangle Arts Association Residency, Brooklyn, NY and The Substation Artist Residency Program, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design and Brooklyn College.