Bio
Tsedaye is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist-curator born in D.C., daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, a mother, a birthworker and sanctuary builder whose practice centers Black feminist theory, migration, and reproductive rights. Tsedaye Makonnen’s light sculptures, textiles, and performance function as a contemporary bridge for Byzantine and Medieval art, particularly through her engagement with spiritual symbolism, sacred objects, and embodied ritual practices. Drawing on her East African heritage, Makonnen reclaims, reinterprets, and reactivates visual and spiritual lineages historically sidelined by Western art canons.
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.
In Fall 2023, Tsedaye exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Africa and Byzantium and was commissioned to make new sculptures and textiles as 1 of 2 living artists in this groundbreaking show. Her light sculptures were on loan at The Walters Art Museum during the Ethiopia at the Crossroads where she was invited to guest curate the contemporary works that traveled to Peabody Essex Museum and Toledo Museum of Art. Additionally, she exhibited at Bard Graduate Center’s SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power, and Prestige and UT Austin’s Visual Art Center’s If we are here. As of 2023, Tsedaye is the inaugural artist selected to design a large-scale, permanent work of art for the city of Providence.
In 2024, she was commissioned to create a performance and new textiles for MetLiveArts with the support of Franklin Furnace for the ‘Africa and Byzantium’ exhibit. She collaborated with EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop on prints for the The Met exhibition. She has been working on an oral history project: Documenting the Ethiopian Communities of DC funded by the Library of Congress. Tsedaye returned to the Clark Art Institute as a research fellow this past summer and has an on-going artist residency and a multi-year collaboration with Williams College ‘62 Center for Theatre & Dance and Williams College Museum of Art on a multimedia, cross-institutional project & publication based on her Astral Sea performance and soft sculpture series. She was also in a group show at the Albuquerque Museum titled Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue.
Currently, Tsedaye’s light sculptures are exhibiting at Smithsonian NMAFA in its own gallery titled: Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes , recently reviewed by The Washington Post. In early 2025 The Walters Art Museum commissioned new site-specific light sculptures inspired by their collection, Sacred :: የተቀደሰ :: Yetekedse, that are permanently displayed in their Medieval gallery. Along with performing at Wellesley College and the Davis Museum for Lorraine O’Grady’s Taking the White Gloves Off series. She is the recipient of a Warhol Foundation grant to research lighting design and worked on set design for a play that premiered in May.
Later this Fall she will be presenting large-scale site specific performances titled Refuge used to live here among the Hoosic River and White Oak Trees at The Clark in collaboration with Williams College and WCMA, as well as coming out with a new publication documenting this project. Tsedaye is also co-curating an exhibition at The Phillips Collection with Tie Jojima and was recently awarded a Mellon Foundation grant supporting a collaborative project expanding on the Ethiopian and Eritrean oral history archives she started building with Hannah Giorgis last year. She goes between DC and London with her partner and children.
Her roster also includes CUNY Graduate Center, NADA Miami, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Kitchen, Lunder Institute for American Art, 1:54 London, CF Hill Gallery (Sweden), 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, Washington Project for the Arts, Photoville & NYU’s Tisch, Artspace New Haven, The Mattress Factory, Park Avenue Armory, Art Dubai, and so much more.
Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Artsy, NYTimes, Vogue, BOMB, Hyperallergic, American Quarterly, BmoreArt, Transition Magazine and more.