Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts

In 1964, Desta entered the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts, founded only a few years earlier by the pioneering Ethiopian artist and educator Alle Felege Selam. She joined among the first generation of women admitted to the school, at a time when pursuing a professional career in fine art was an extraordinary path for an Ethiopian woman. Of the women in her pioneering cohort, Desta would go on to sustain a professional career as an artist.

Masters Who Shaped desta

Her years at the school placed her in the midst of an extraordinary period in Ethiopian modern art. She studied painting under Gebre Kristos Desta, whose approach to abstraction and modernism became an enduring influence on her artistic development. She also received guidance from Skunder Boghossian and German printmaker Hansen Bahia.

But her education extended beyond the classroom. Desta became part of the vibrant intellectual life surrounding Addis Ababa's Creative Arts Center, where painters, poets, playwrights and writers gathered. She encountered figures including Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin and Mengistu Lemma, and even performed in one of Mengistu Lemma's plays.

By the time she completed her studies in 1969, she had moved from a young girl instinctively drawn to color and flowers to an artist developing a voice of her own. Her graduation period culminated in a solo exhibition at the Ras Hotel—recognized as the first one-person exhibition by a woman painter in Ethiopia.