Mihret Kebede

CV

Mihret Kebede is an artist/poet, who 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.

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Mihret Kebede has participated in several local and international art exhibitions, workshops, poetry performances, art residencies, and collaborative art projects. Beyond her artistic practices, she is also well known for organizing local and international art events and festivals. Among her numerous involvements in organizing artistic events Mihret is a co-organizer and founding member of Addis video art festival together with the initiator of the festival Ezra Wube, and a founding manager of a popular monthly poetry and jazz event at Ras Hotel, a founding director of Netsa Art Village, artists collective which later forcedly closed by the government officials in 2015 after seven years of serving the contemporary art scene in the country.

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She also organized several collaborative poetry and jazz projects and performances locally and internationally including workshops and seminars with Studio Olafur Eliasson, followed by her solo show in the studio in 2012. Her poems and essays are included in the Wax and Gold: Poetry Jazz book Published by Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin and Tobiya Poetic Jazz, Addis Ababa, and also featured in the first-ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees ,Carcanet Press.

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She is currently a Ph.D. in-practice program candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with a working title conversing with Silence as a continuity of her project silence during her MA study at Alle school of fine arts and Design, Addis Ababa University.