Mihret Kebede

Mihret kebede is an Artist/poet graduated from Addis Ababa university School of Fine Arts and Design in painting with distinction in 2007 and has earned her MA in arts from the same school in 2016. She has received a certificate award of recognition as the best practicing artist in 2013 from the Ministry of culture and tourism, Ethiopia.

Mihret did several collaborative poetry and jazz projects and performances with Studio Olafur Eliasson followed by her show in the studio in 2012. Mihret has participated in several local and international art exhibitions, workshops, residencies and collaborative art projects. Beyond her artistic practices she is also known for organizing local and international artistic events and festivals. Mihret is also co-organizing Addis video art festival together with the initiator of the festival Ezra Wube.

Mihret is a PhD-in-practice program candidate at the academy of fine arts with a working title ‘Conversing with Silence’

Kibrom Gebremedhin

Kibrom Gebremedhin is an Artist and Art Educator. He graduated from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University (A.A.U.) from the Department of Art Education (B.F.A.) in 2006. Currently he is working as a lecturer at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design. Kibrom is agraduate of the masters program at A.A.U. Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, holding a Master of Fine Arts. Kibrom was a participant in the 6th Center for Contemporary Art Lagos’ Asiko International Art Programme in 2016. He has exhibited his artwork at several solo and group exhibitions between 2012 to present. Most of Kibrom’s artwork is influenced by the thought and practice of the Church and also daily social life, as observed in his environment, and reflected in different media. He uses mainly oil painting for his artwork in addition to drawing, photography, video and animation.

Robel Temesgen

Robel Temesgen (b. 1987, Ethiopia) received a BFA in Painting from Addis Abeba University in 2010. His practice focuses on painting and encompasses elements of performance, installation, video and collaborative projects.
Temesgen taught painting at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Abeba between 2010 and 2013. He is currently undertaking an MFA at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, University of Tromsø, Norway. His work has been exhibited in Ethiopia and internationally.

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.

Chiara Cartuccia

Chiara Cartuccia is an art historian, independent art writer and curator based in London.  She studied Art History at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and completed a research period at Freie Universität Berlin and Akademie der Künste Berlin. She gained a Master of Arts degree in Visual Cultures/Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, with a dissertation discussing the construction of artistic subjectivity in late 70s West-Berlin.

Chiara collaborated with international institutions and organisations active in the field of contemporary visual and performance art. Between 2013 and 2015, she was Head of Performance Art Department and Curator of the Performance Art Programmes at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin. For SAVVY Chiara curated the performance art programme PRESENT TENSE SERIES.

Since 2014, she is co-founding director of the editorial and curatorial project EX NUNC. Chiara is a freelance contributor to several art magazines, a PhD candidate at University of Amsterdam and she is part of the Curatorial/Knowledge research group at Goldsmiths, University of London.  In 2017 Chiara was appointed Curatorial and Public Programme Coordinator at Manifesta 12 Palermo.

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.

William Corwin

Will Corwin is a sculptor based in New York. He writes for Frieze, ArtPapers, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artcritical and has a regular interview program on Clocktower Radio. His most recent projects include "La Dolce Vita," the fall 2015 issue of Art Core Journal that was a collection of short videos with artists including Joyce Pensato, Mike Cloud, Carin Riley, Roxy Paine, Mike Ballou, Xaviera Simmons, and Paul Anthony Smith; a series of articles about the origins of human creativity for ArtPapers that began with an interview with Colin Renfrew, and the exhibition Devotion at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery and Cyborg at Zurcher Gallery, both in New York in the fall of 2015. Corwin curated the 2015 Lumen Video Art Festival at Snug Harbor and he curated a short program of mostly New York based artists for the 2015-16 Addis Video Art Festival.

Portia Malatjie

Portia Malatjie completed an MA in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand (2011) following a Fine Art degree at the same institution (2008). She has curated numerous exhibitions, which include it began with a walk, an exhibition of video artworks from the Emile Stipp collection (2013, 2014); commute with intuitive instinct, Brundyn+ (2014); suspension of disbelief, Brundyn+ (2015); Transference, Johannesburg Art Gallery (2012), and many others. In 2012, Malatjie was guest curator for the MTN New Contemporaries Award, which led to an exhibition at the Castle of Goodhope in Cape Town. She lectured History of Art and Visual Culture at Rhodes University, Grahamstown (2012 – 2013) and has guest lectured at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University. She has published in journals, exhibition catalogues and newspapers such as the Mail & Guardian, Artthrob, Third Text, Social Dynamics and Public Intimacy: Art and other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Malatjie was Head Curator of Brundyn+ Gallery (2014 - 2015) and the director of the AVA Gallery (2015). She was one of the recipients of the 2014 College Art Association Travel Grant where she travelled to Chicago to attend and present at the Annual College Art Association Conference.

Ezra Wube

Ezra Wube (b. 1980, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is a mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work references the notion of past and present, the constant changing of place, and the dialogical tension between "here" and "there". His exhibitions include The 21st International Festival of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil(2019);  Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju South Korea (2018), Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY (2017); The 13th Biennial de Lyon, Lyon, France (2015); Dak’Art 2014 Biennale, Dakar, Senegal (2014); and At the Same Moment, Time Square Arts Midnight Moment, New York, NY (2013).

Ezra's awards and residencies includes Smack Mellon Studio Program, Brooklyn, Pioneer Works Residency, LMCC Workspace Residency (2017), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, Wave Hill Winter Workspace Residency, Bronx, NY, Triangle Art Residency (2015), AIM, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2014); Swing Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY (2013); The Substation, Johannesburg, South Africa (2011); Château de la Napoule, France (2011). Ezra received his BFA (2004) from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA and an MFA (2009) from Hunter College, New York, NY.

Michael Hailu