Abebe Bikila was a celebrated Ethiopian marathon runner, who won back-to-back Olympic races in 1960 and 1964, while competing barefoot in the Rome games.

Alexander ‘Skunder’ Boghossian was an Ethiopian-Armenian painter. He was born in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, and was awarded a scholarship in 1955 to study abroad in Europe, where he attended school in London. He then continued his studies at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. He returned to Ethiopia for a short time to teach until emigrating to the United States in 1970, where he taught at several institutions, including Howard University in Washington, D.C. While living in the States, Skunder engaged with the Civil Rights movement which heavily influenced his art; interweaving symbols from his culture with those of the contemporary political climate, and employing aesthetic and compositional elements of Western modernism.