Martha Haile is a visual artist in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In October of 2019, she gave her debut exhibition in the United States at Wagner College’s Spotlight Gallery in the Horrmann Library. Her exhibition reflected on how the female body is objectified by the medical gaze. She creatively reworked x-rays and other medical images of body parts into expressive, aesthetic subjects.
Martha has a Masters of Fine Arts from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University. She works in a range of mediums including painting, design, and film, and she has recently served as the assistant art director for the feature film Fig Tree, a movie set in Ethiopia in 1989 during civil war, about the love between a Jewish girl and a Christian boy.
While at Wagner, she gave a presentation to students in Professor Jenny Toth’s oil painting class and Professor Steven Thomas’s world literature class. Thomas met Martha when he was a Fulbright Scholar in Ethiopia in 2016.
In addition, during her week-long tour of New York, she had receptions for her art at the Canvas Institute in Staten Island and the Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn. The Canvas Institute is unique in Staten Island for working collaboratively with local African Diaspora and African-American community organizations. At the Five Myles gallery, her art appeared alongside the work of other artists from Trinidad, Iran, Republic of Congo, Pakistan, and Ghana in a program celebrating diversity entitled Trajectory.
