Elizabeth Woldegiorgis, Who Brought Ethiopia's Forgotten Modernists Back to Light, Dies at 69

Apr 27 , 2025. By TIZITA SHEWAFERAW ( Fortune Staff Writer )

Elizabeth Woldegiorgis (PhD) began the morning of September 11, 2001, like any other. She drank warm coffee, took an ordinary phone call and lingered in the lobby of the Japanese investment bank where she worked before heading up to her desk on the 53rd Floor. Minutes later, the first plane hit the World Trade Centre (WTC). She escaped, but the blast tore up her plans. She never returned to finance.

Survival pushed her toward older passions: art, scholarship and discussion. She enrolled in a doctorate program in the history of art and visual studies at Cornell University, where she met the literary scholar Dagmawi Woubshet, a professor who became a lifelong friend.

“She was bold, principled, and witty,” he said, remembering how she challenged every seminar text.

Elizabeth’s thesis excavated Ethiopian modernism, bringing painters and sculptors who had been erased from the record back into the spotlight. That rebellion had personal roots. She grew up as the youngest of seven. Her father, an Orthodox Church scholar from the Northern Shewa area, the first editor-in-chief of the state-owned Amharic daily "Addis Zemen," told his children that life spuns around three fixed stars: God, the Emperor and kin. At Nazareth School, a Catholic girls’ school in Addis Abeba, she glimpsed another constellation and chose her own guiding lights: art, freedom and fearless talk.

Politics strained the family after she moved to the United States. She drifted from one of her brothers, Dawit, a major in the army and a senior government official during the Derg era, best known for his role as chief of the Relief & Rehabilitation Commission (RRC). The quarrel lasted for years until a face-to-face meeting at a hotel thawed it, which still makes him teary when he recalls the moment.

“She had a way of melting anger with honesty,” he recalled. “The way she expressed brotherhood and politics will stay with me forever.”

From the start, Elizabeth wanted spaces where ideas collided in public. As director first of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) and later of the Modern Art Museum – Gebre Kristos Desta Centre - she shook dusty archives awake. Her book, "Modernist Art in Ethiopia," a winner of the Bethwell A. Ogbot Prize, incorporated neglected artists into a proud but contested history and challenged the silences imposed by emperors and revolutionaries.

“She picked the Institute up from the ground and paved the way,” said Dagmawi, who credits her with drawing him back to Addis Abeba to present a paper.

She staged major shows, including a retrospective on her friend Skunder Boghossian, whose restless spirit she captured in essays.

Authenticity earned her friendships that jumped age, class and geography, but it startled the stiff-collared.

Bekele Mekonnen (Prof.), a colleague, remembered a woman who could slip from bar talk in Addis’s quarters to an art symposium in Sharjah.

“She disdained the pretenses of conventional formalities during critiques, debated fiercely and spoke loudly," he said.

Travel never loosened her grip on home. Whether in Vienna, Belgrade or the Gulf, she stitched stories from Ethiopia into every conversation. She fought for women air-brushed from modernity’s canvas and, in a manuscript finished in 2023, showed how exclusion was baked into cultural politics. She lived that principle too, choosing partners, houses and rituals on her own terms and setting an example for younger women boxed in by custom.

Her flat in Addis Abeba was legendary. Visitors recall the blue haze from her Captain Black pipe, the plates of food and the talk that ran past midnight. Dagmawi still sees the waiter who froze when he spotted a woman puffing on a pipe in a city café. Elizabeth only laughed.

Was this something he was not supposed to see?

“Elsi knew how to lighten the mood,” he said.

Music fed her. She loved sushi in Manhattan, Madingo Afework’s album "Godanaw" and the aching voice of Asnakech Worku, whose songs she sometimes sang for friends.

Yet, the last years weighed heavily. She mourned the loss of her friend Andreas Eshete (Prof.), a prominent intellectual who once presided at the Addis Abeba University, and her childhood home in Addis Abeba, demolished before she could turn it into a museum.

“She was vulnerable just as much as she was bold,” said Dagmawi.

Even as her health faded, Elizabeth kept drafting articles, plotting conferences and whispering about the next book. Her last curatorial project stepped further outside accepted frames. Working with the artist Henok Melkamzer, she championed "telsem", Ethiopian talismanic drawings of symbols and spells, insisting they were modern in their own right.

Elizabeth often admitted that the switch from Wall Street spreadsheets to campus libraries was terrifying. At the bank, she had thrived on hard numbers: foreign-exchange trades, yield curves, the drill of profit and loss. At Cornell, she swapped profit targets for footnotes and learned that a half-forgotten mural could hold as much truth as any balance sheet. Friends joke that she turned those quantitative instincts to grant applications, reading every line of small print before a curator signed.

Her overhaul of the Institute was dramatic. She digitised 40,000 photographs, catalogued manuscripts that had been gathering dust since the 1960s, and opened a reading room that stayed busy until midnight. When funds ran low, she called former bankers, shamed ministers on live radio and persuaded embassies to sponsor conservation workshops.

The Modern Art Museum was more fragile, consisting of a handful of rooms in the old palace's stable block. Elizabeth hustled up the scaffolding, rewired the galleries, rigged new lights, and doubled visitor numbers within two years. Ticket sales jumped by 65pc, a statistic almost unheard of in Ethiopia’s underfunded cultural sector.

Students remember that she never let them hide behind jargon.

“Explain it so your grandmother understands,” she would insist during critiques.

Yet, Elizabeth had no patience for lazy compromise; a mis-hung painting could trigger a fierce monologue on dignity and labour. On quiet evenings, she played "Godanaw" on repeat while editing. When the Asnakech song ended, she knew the draft was done. Then she would email peers across three time zones, make another pot of coffee and start again.

Colleagues say she brought the same drive to Sharjah, where she helped build the Africa Institute from scratch. She designed programmes on cinema from the Horn, feminist writing across the Sahel and the role of port cities in culture. She insisted that academic prose make sense to the people whose stories it described. After lectures, she paced hotel lobbies, pipe in hand, hammering a thesis into shape until the call to prayer drifted across the corniche.

Elizabeth died on March 16, 2025, in Sharjah. She was buried at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Abeba.

Friends and family agree that Elizabeth's legacy lies in the act of seeing – seeing art as part of a global discussion, and seeing women whose stories had been erased as full creators of culture and meaning.

PUBLISHED ON Apr 27,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1304]

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