Bio
Tsedaye Makonnen is an interdisciplinary artist-curator and cultural producer. Tsedaye’s practice is driven by Black feminist theory, firsthand site-specific research, and ethical social practice techniques, which become solo and collaborative site sensitive performances, objects, installations, and films. Her studio primarily focuses on intersectional feminism, reproductive health and migration. Tsedaye’s personal history is as a mother, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, a doula and a sanctuary builder.
In 2019 Tsedaye was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and staged two interventions at the Venice Biennale titled When Drowning is the Best Option feat. Astral Sea I. In 2021 her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art for their permanent collection and she published a book titled Black Women as/and the Living Archive. In the Fall of 2022 she was invited to perform at the Venice Biennale for Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat: Venice and was Clark Art Institute’s Futures Fellow.
As of 2023, Tsedaye is working on a permanent large-scale public art commission for the city of Providence to be unveiled between 2024 & 2025. In Fall 2023, Tsedaye exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Africa and Byzantium, The Walters Art Museum’s Ethiopia at the Crossroads where she is the guest curator of contemporary works that are also traveling to Peabody Essex Museum and Toledo Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center’s SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power, and Prestige and UT Austin’s If we are here.
This 2024 in collaboration with DC Public Libraries, they are recent recipients of the Library of Congress Connecting Communities Digital Initiative award for Documenting the Ethiopian Communities of DC. Additionally this year, she has been commissioned to create a performance for MetLiveArts with the support of Franklin Furnace for the Africa and Byzantium exhibit, she is performing for Lorraine O’Grady’s: Both/And exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, she will return to Clark Art Institute as a research fellow and much more. She lives between DC and London with her partner and children.
Her work has been featured in Artsy, NYTimes, Vogue, BOMB, Hyperallergic, American Quarterly, BmoreArt, Transition Magazine and more.
Additional Bio: In 2018 she studied sculpture with her mentor El Anatsui in Nsukka, Nigeria supported by her year-long residency with DC Public Libraries. In 2021 she curated an exhibit and published a book with Washington Project for the Arts titled ‘Black Women as/and the Living Archive’ based on Alisha B. Wormsley’s ‘Children of Nan’. In 2021, she exhibited at Photoville & NYU’s Tisch, the Walters Art Museum as a Sondheim Prize Finalist, CFHill gallery in Stockholm, Sweden and 1:54 in London. In 2022 she exhibited at Artspace New Haven in CT, The Mattress Factory and much more. Other exhibitions include Park Avenue Armory, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Art Dubai, and more. She has performed at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Art on the Vine (Martha's Vineyard), Chale Wote Street Art Festival (Ghana), El Museo del Barrio, Fendika Cultural Center (Ethiopia), Festival International d'Art Performance (Martinique), Queens Museum, the Smithsonian's, The Momentary and more.
Image: Image shot by Ayana Evans | Shearer Cottage, Martha’s Vineyard 2019 | All Rights Reserved