Elizabeth Giorgis, a scholar who left her banking job to study African modernism and Ethiopian art history, and went on to become one of the preeminent experts in her field, died on March 16 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. She was 68 years old. The Africa Institute of Global Studies University, where she chaired the humanities department, announced her passing last week but did not specify a cause.
Salah M. Hassan, dean of the Africa Institute and chancellor of Global Studies University, said in a statement to ARTnews, “Elizabeth’s scholarly influence extended far beyond the walls of academia. Her ability to bridge gaps and create connections across cultures and disciplines was one of her greatest strengths.”
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He continued, “Her contributions to journals, conferences, and international exhibitions made her an invaluable voice in the discourse on African modernism and the representation of Ethiopian women in art. Her award-winning book Modernist Art in Ethiopia is among the finest studies on African modernism to date.”
Giorgis once wrote that her work was part of a quest to understand her own identity as a person of Ethiopian descent living in diaspora. In a biographical sketch penned in 2010 as part of her dissertation, titled “Ethiopian Modernism: A Subaltern Perspective,” she described herself as “a product of this displaced generation of young Ethiopians who immigrated to the United States at a young age fearing persecution, genocide and torture.”
“Although her adopted homeland gave her sanctuary and protection,” Giorgis wrote of herself, using the third person, “she lived as a dislocated soul for twenty-seven years remembering and at the same time denying the trauma and genocide of her past.”
Born in 1956, Giorgis attended undergraduate and graduate programs in the US, working as a banker for 17 years. She wrote of visiting Ethiopia several times, with each trip helping “to shatter the fantasies of a romanticized past that had burdened her for so long.”
She described 9/11 as a “decisive factor” in her departure from the banking world. Her office was at the World Trade Center, and though she was not physically harmed that fateful day, she emerged from it with a new desire to enact what she called “social change” through her labor.
She enrolled in a museum studies masters program at New York University, graduating in 2004 and relocating to Ethiopia that same year. In Addis Ababa, she led the Institute of Ethiopian Studies.
“Her move nevertheless made her realize the ironies of the diasporic self that entangled itself with a romanticized notion of the past and that consistently failed to recognize a recent history of debt, mass migration and civil war,” Giorgis wrote. And so, she went to Cornell University’s art history program, receiving a PhD in 2010.
She held various posts in the intervening years, including one at the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center in Addis Ababa, where she served as director and organized shows for artists such as Olafur Eliasson in 2015. On Facebook this week, Eliasson wrote that Giorgis’s “critical contributions to art discourse and art history in Ethiopia as well as her incredible generosity in sharing perspectives and wisdom, and in supporting younger generations of artists make her a source of inspiration for artists and academics in Ethiopia and beyond.”
Her 2019 book Modernist Art in Ethiopia has received praise in academic circles for the way it places visual art in conversation with developments in related fields, such as music and literature. In 2024, she curated a Sharjah Art Foundation survey of Henok Melkamzer, whose paintings rely upon symbols derived from the ancient Ethiopian tradition of telsem.
Hoor Al Qasimi, president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and president of Global Studies University, told ARTnews, “Professor Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis was an integral part of The Africa Institute of Global Studies University, from its very inception, contributing immensely to its formation and the development of its curriculum, leading up to the eventual licensing and establishment of the Global Studies University, and the accreditation of its graduate program. Elizabeth’s work as a professor and chair of the Department of Humanities at The Africa Institute was nothing short of extraordinary. Her dedication and unwavering commitment helped shape the foundation for where we are today as an institution and as we accepted our first class of graduate students.”