Surafel Wondimu Abebe

Surafel Wondimu Abebe is a public-intellectual who uses academia, performance, and media as sites of cultural politics from which to interrogate representational practices. He has worked with the National Theatre in Addis Ababa and other cultural institutions in Ethiopia as an actor, playwright and director, and recently co-founded a new local television station called ASHAM. He obtained a degree in English Literature minoring in Political Science and International Relations from Addis Ababa University, and received his MA in Cultural Studies at the same university, where he served as a lecturer and Assistant Dean in Humanities. He completed his Ph.D in Performance Historiography at The University of Minnesota, minoring in Comparative Literature.

Abebe is an assistant professor of Performance Studies and Theories at The Africa Institute of Sharjah, UAE where he completed the Inaugural Okwui Enwezor postdoctoral fellowship in Visual Arts, Performance Studies, and Critical Humanities. Abebe has served as a lecturer, assistant professor, and deputy dean of Humanities at Addis Ababa University working with Literature Department, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Center for African Studies, and College of Performing and Visual Arts. He is a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, an editorial member of AGITATE, an online journal, and an associate editor of Pamiętnik Teatranly, a prime journal in Poland. Abebe engages with performance and embodied historiography in order to respond to global-local predicaments in the present. He is working on his book project that studies the ways in which Ethiopian women performers maneuver and reinvent spaces of empire/s, revolutions, and neoliberal globalization.