JJJJJerome Ellis is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters living in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory. Working across music, performance, writing, video, and photography, concepts that organize his practice include unknowing, improvisation, fugitivity, illegibility, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Their work emerges from a monastery on a creek in Norfolk, VA, where they live with poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis.

Ellis’s solo and collaborative work has been presented at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, REDCAT in Los Angeles, ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics in Pittsburgh, Arraymusic in Toronto, and MASS MoCA in North Adams. He received the United States Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital, and Fulbright awards, and presented Sonic Bathhouse at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Ellis has been a lecturer in Sound Design at Yale University, and their work has been covered by The Guardian, This American Life, Pitchfork, and Artforum, among others.

Image by Annie Forrest