Adiskidan Ambaye was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and spent her formative years between Ethiopia and Germany before moving to the United States to pursue formal arts education. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2002, where she specialised in sculpture and furniture design, a foundation that continues to shape her distinctive visual practice. From the outset of her career, Adiskidan has blurred the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture, approaching each work as a layered interplay of material and form. At the core of Adiskidan’s practice is a sustained investigation of process and surface. Her sculptures are meticulously constructed from numerous hand-cut slices of plywood fused together to resemble monolithic forms while revealing their composite nature through concentric ring markings.

Adiskidan’s work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group contexts. Notable solo exhibitions include Exile Within (2025) and Liberty (2020) at Addis Fine Art, Addis Ababa. Group presentations include Connected Threads: Contemporary Art from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora (2024) with Addis Fine Art in New York, and Abu Dhabi Art Fair (2023), where her sculptural works stood in dialogue with works on canvas by Sudanese artist Amel Bashier.