Helina Gebremedhen

Helina Gebremedhen is the Leigh and Mary Carter Director’s Research Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is currently pursuing a PhD in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research focuses on medieval African and Islamic art history, specializing in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, with a particular interest in the wider context of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean regions and the cultural, intellectual, and commercial networks that connected those spaces and societies. She obtained an MA in history from McGill University, Montreal, and a BA in Near and Middle Eastern civilizations from the University of Toronto.

In her role as a predoctoral fellow, she works within the CMA’s African art curatorial area to support the upcoming international loan exhibition Africa and Byzantium, including contributing to the accompanying catalogue. A second project currently underway is a comprehensive assessment of the CMA’s holdings of North African textiles and jewelry—a little-known collection of objects spread across both the museum’s permanent and education art collections—and the curating of six gallery rotations to bring these artworks into public view.

Contact the Curator at: AfricanArt@clevelandart.org