Dr. Giorgis completed her PhD at Cornell in 2010, with Salah Hassan as her dissertation supervisor and Iftikhar Dadi as member of her dissertation committee. Before that, she had received her master’s degree in museum studies from New York University.
Dr. Giorgis served in several leadership roles in Ethiopia: Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art, and Director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University.
During the past few years, she had been the Chair of the Department of Humanities and Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at The Africa Institute in Sharjah.
Elizabeth Giorgis was very active as a scholar of African art and a mentor to many others. Her award-winning book, Modernist Art in Ethiopia (2019), on Ethiopian modern art is a major pioneering study, and it is among her many other writings and contributions in recent years.
A recent co-edited book (with Dagmawi Woubshet and Surafel W. Abebe) is Ethiopia: Modern Nation–Ancient Roots (2024). Her recent research focused on gender in Ethiopia. She had also curated several significant exhibitions of African art in Ethiopia and Sharjah.
Elizabeth Giorgis was a faculty member in MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia) led by Iftikhar Dadi, which was supported by a Getty Foundation grant and held in Hong Kong in August 2019 and Dhaka, Bangladesh, in February 2020. And during 2012-13 she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University.
Elizabeth Giorgis's legacy is one of intellectual brilliance, ethical scholarship, and profound generosity.
For more on her accomplishments, see
https://www.theafricainstitute.org/institute-team/elizabeth-w-giorgis/
