Playwright · Screenwriter · Professor · Queer Jester from Amish PA
(they/she)
LA/NYC/London/🌏
"First-rate and surprising."
-Steve Martin (for real, not a bit)
"I hope you won't pass on the opportunity to experience the creation of this wonderful playwright."
- Lynn Nottage
“A bold, intense, unapologetic writer with comedic dialogue, historical intentions, and stunning
expressionism, who chooses great stories to tell, leaving you feeling disturbed, inspired, and seen.”
-The Athena Project
Ellis, like the island (they/she), is a produced playwright, commissioned screenwriter, professor, Columbia University graduate (Playwriting MFA 2023), and gay disgrace to their Amish Lancaster, PA upbringing. They write irreverent yet intimate, shamelessly Gen Z, coming-of dark dark comedies that deteriorate into dramedies, about quirky cults and liberating love, exploring vulnerability and connection in our world today.
Currently bicoastal and bicontinental, Ellis is developing a feature film with Andrew Barchilon (The Eric Andre Show), award-winning pilot with CAA and Leigh Silverman (Suffs), musical with 90s boy band Dream Street produced by Taylor Banks and Micheal Lamon (Merrily We Roll Along), new full-length play with Baron's Court Theater in London, and feature film commission (all 2025).
Last summer, Ellis was a Resident Playwright at Williamstown Theatre Festival (2024). Prior, she served as Showrunner of the Episodic Theatre Project, a five-part series produced weekly at Under St. Mark's Theater (Feb-May 2024).
Ellis's full-length plays ONCE ON RUMSPRINGA, WHITE BITCHES IN DELHI, and WHERE I'VE NEVER GONE have been presented in NYC by The Wild Project, Westbeth Artists Gallery (site-specific), Bohemian National Hall, UP Theater, Yonder Window Theatre, and Chain Theatre, atop numerous national and international productions (2021-present).
They've been awarded Semifinalist recognition by O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Ojai Play Festival, American Blues Theater, Lanford Wilson Festival, Pipeline PlayLab, and Faultline Theater, and a Finalist with the Dramatists Guild, Emerson Stages, Kernodle, and James Madison Festival, to name a few (2023-present). Their pilot TAART is a Semifinalist in contests by Slamdance, Stage 32, The Script Lab, Filmmatic, and ScreenCraft and ranked in the Top 1% of 160,000 scripts on Coverfly (2025).
Professionally, Ellis has been a mentee of Steve Martin, David Henry Hwang, and Lynn Nottage (2023), Writer's Assistant to Bess Wohl (2022) and Edward Einhorn (2019-21), and full-time screenwriter for episodic app Inkitt-Galatea (2019-20).
Additionally, she's been a Resident Playwright at Prague Performing Arts Academy (2019) and Wallace Stegner House (2020), member of playwrights groups at Speranza Theater (2021 & 2024-2025) and Yonder Window Theater (2022), and published in Borderless Thalia Anthology, sold at The Drama Book Shop (2023).
Owing to their rural lower-SES roots, Ellis hyperfixates on wealth and class privilege, social performatism, political polarization, gender roles, toxic co-dependency, identity commodification, and existential psychology, yeehaw :)
Lowkey, Ellis has also completed five degrees, two theses, and two fellowships at Penn State Honors College (2019), hitch-hiked solo across numerous continents, and worked as a stand-up comic and certified psychotherapist, before realizing she obviously just needed therapy. Regardless, for jokes or diagnoses, they're your dealer.
