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 Playwriting MFA graduate (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.
In 2025, Ellis wrote a feature film script with Andrew Barchilon (The Eric Andre Show), musical with 90s boy band Dream Street produced by Taylor Banks and Micheal Lamon (Merrily We Roll Along), brand new full-length play presented at Baron's Court Theater in London, and feature film commission for indie filmmaker Paul Baker (all 2025). Additionally, they had an industry reading for ONCE ON RUMSPRINGA, starring Fina Strazza (John Proctor is the Villain) and Andrew Keenan-Bolger (Newsies), which is currently being adapted for television by Fifth Season (Severance) (2026).
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 (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, Chain Theatre, Westbeth Artists Gallery (site-specific), Bohemian National Hall, UP Theater, and Yonder Window Theatre, atop numerous regional and international productions and development opportunities (2021-present).
They've been awarded Semifinalist recognition by O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Ojai Theater 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 New Works Lab, 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, commodification of identity, 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.
