Live @ LOW END | JJJJJerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis is an artist and a proud stutterer. He makes music and writes books. He lives in Tidewater, Virginia with his wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis. They love walking in the woods, reading, and drinking tea together.

His body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents.

His debut album, The Clearing (2021), was called “an astonishing, must-listen project” (The Guardian). It was co-produced by NNA Tapes and The Poetry Project, and it was released with an accompanying book published by Wendy’s Subway. Poet/essayist/playwright Claudia Rankine said of the book: “The Clearing is many things: a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech; a restless interrogation of linear time; an intimate portrait of the author’s real-time experience of his stutter; a baptism in syllable and sound; and a manuscript illuminated by The Stutter. At its core, Ellis’ metaphor of the clearing becomes a place of possibility and “momentary, transitory, glimpsed liberation.” He invites us to meet him there.” The Clearing won the 2022 Anna Rabinowitz Prize.

He has received a Fulbright Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Fellowship (2022), a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grants to Artists Award (2022), a Creative Capital Grant (2022). He has received residencies at MacDowell (2019, 2022), Ucross (2021), Lincoln Center Theater (2019), ISSUE Project Room (2021), and La MaMa (2021).