Joel Dawit Makonnen
member of the Ethiopian Imperial Family
Prince Joel David Makonnen Haile Selassie (Yoel Dawit Makonnen Haile Selassie; born 5 May 1982) is an attorney, businessman, philanthropist, writer, and member of the Ethiopian Imperial House of Solomon. He is the great-grandson of Haile Selassie I, the last Emperor of Ethiopia.
Makonnen was born in exile in Rome and grew up in Switzerland and France, attending both the Collège du Léman in Geneva and Sainte Croix des Neiges in Haute Savoie. In 1999, he returned to Ethiopia with his mother, living in Addis Ababa. He moved to the United States and, in 2009, worked as the director of grants for Humanities DC, a non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a legal intern at the United Nations in 2011 and worked as a law clerk in international trade and equal opportunity employment in 2013. Since 2017, Makonnen has served as a legal aid and corporate counsel for Otsuka Pharmaceutical.
He is the co-founder and director of Alchemy World Projects USA, an educational and entrepreneurship organization that serves impoverished youth in Ethiopia, and is the co-founder of the media company Old World/New World Productions, which he launched with his wife, Ariana Austin Makonnen. In 2021, he co-authored a children's novel with Kwame Mbalia titled Last Gate of the Emperor.
Early life and family
Makonnen was born in exile in Rome, Italy in 1982.
The public source identifies “Joel Dawit Makonnen” as member of the Ethiopian Imperial Family. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Joel, Dawit and Makonnen.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joel Dawit Makonnen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.