Ezra Wube was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1980 and immigrated to the USA at the age of eighteen. He trained in painting, gaining multiple awards before receiving his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 2004, going on to study at Hunter College, New York, NY, where he gained his MFA in 2009. He has exhibited in Brazil, France, Germany, Latvia, South Korea, the USA and the UK, participating in the travelling exhibition ‘Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy: Video Art from Africa’, shown at Ben Uri Gallery, London in 2014. His work subsequently entered the Ben Uri Collection and was included in the centenary exhibition ‘Out of Chaos: Ben Uri – 100 Years in London’ at Somerset House in 2015. He was awarded the Massachusetts Annual Black Achievement Award in 2003 and held his first solo exhibition at the Dreams of Freedom Museum in Boston, Massachusetts the same year. He has participated in multiple group exhibitions including the ‘Ethiopian Millennium’ exhibition at the Blackburn Gallery, Washington, DC in 2007. He is a member of the faculty at the Parsons School of Design, and since 2015 has organised the ‘Addis Video Art Festival’, a platform for international video art in Addis Ababa.
Wube is a mixed-media artist, converging photography, video, performance, and animation, also producing installation pieces, however specialising in film. His work references the notions of past and present, the constant changing of place, and the dialogical tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’, reflecting on his own experience and identity moving from Ethiopia to the USA, as well as engaging with the work of other Ethiopian contemporary artists and groups including the Netsa Village. Wube’s animations have travelled to a range of countries in touring exhibitions and video arts festivals, such as ‘ARTchSO’ Africa Video Art in Rennes, France.
Ezra Wube now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is represented by the Microscope Gallery in New York, NY.
