Hiwot Admasu Getaneh was born in Addis Ababa in 1988 and studied electrical engineering and Information Technology before going on to enrol in Blue Nile Film Academy. Her first short film, New Eyes was presented in 2015 in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2016, she made a short documentary, Letters from Ethiopia, commissioned by the Rotterdam International Film Festival. A Fool God is her second short fiction film. She has taken part in the Talent Lab of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Addis to Cannes project, which takes emerging Ethiopian filmmakers to Cannes, the Locarno Summer Academy, the Berlinale Talents Campus, the Durban Talents (a workshop for African directors) and the Realness African Screenwriters Residency. She is currently working on the development of her first feature film, Sweet Annoyance.