Artist and researcher Efrat Yerday will draw upon the work of several contemporary visual artists, including Zauditu Yossef-Seri, Tgst Ron Yossef, Michal Mamit Worku, and Nirit Takele, as well as the works of younger artists, including Ephraim Wasse, Jenet Belai, and Rachel Aniyu, to illustrate the challenges faced by Ethiopian Jewish artists in Israel today.

Yerday will discuss how Israeli artists of Ethiopian descent often feel forced to choose one side of their identity in their lives and work, along with the diverse strategies these artists use to navigate these challenges.

About the speaker

Efrat Yerday is an artist and researcher, poet and cultural entrepreneur. She is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Tel Aviv University, writing about Ethiopian Jews in Israel between 1955-1975 and the struggle for citizenship. Yerday is also the chairwoman of the Association for Ethiopian Jews and in 2020 won New Israel Fund’s Gallanter Prize for emerging Israeli social justice leaders.

Yerday is the co-editor of “The Monk and the Lion: Contemporary Ethiopian Visual Art in Israel” (Achoti Press, 2017) and wrote the epilogue for the 2018 Hebrew translation of Zora Neal Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In 2018, Yerday joined film director Bazi Gete in coordinating the Atesib! African film festival, the first of its kind in Israel.

Her scholarly work has appeared in the journal Anthropology of the Middle East and she was a panelist and presenter at the Annual Israeli Sociological Society Conference in 2020 and 2021.

This event is cosponsored by the UW African Studies Program.

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