BIOGRAPHY
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“JJJJJerome Ellis is a disabled animal, artist, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, they ask what stuttering can teach us about justice.”

Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, JJJJJerome lives in Norfolk, Virginia with their wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis. JJJJJerome received early music education in the Virginia Beach public school system and went on to receive a BA in Music Theory from Columbia University; and lecture on Sound Design at Yale University.
Concepts that organize JJJJJerome’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. Their 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. 

Their debut album, The Clearing (2021), was called “an astonishing, must-listen project” by 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. Claudia Rankine said of the book: “The Clearing is many things: a lyrical celebration 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.”

JJJJJerome has received the Wynn Newhouse Award, the Anna Rabinowitz Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Fellowship (2022), a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grants to Artists Award (2022), and a Creative Capital Grant (2022). They have conducted residencies at MacDowell (2019, 2022), Lincoln Center Theater (2019), ISSUE Project Room (2021), amongst others.

JJJJJerome’s work has been presented at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Getty Center,  Lincoln Center, the Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Poetry Project, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center, Silent Green (Berlin), Open Book/Liquid Media (Minneapolis), The Lab (San Francisco), National Sawdust, ISSUE Project Room (New York), Haus der Kunst (Munich); Rewire Festival (The Hague); Chrysler Hall (Norfolk, Virginia); MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts); Arraymusic (Toronto); Oklahoma Contemporary (Oklahoma City), Artspace (New Haven), Ballroom Marfa, the Big Ears Festival (Knoxville), and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pittsburgh), among others. JJJJJerome has received commissions from the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, The Shed, and REDCAT. Their work has been covered by The Guardian, This American Life, Pitchfork, Artforum, Black Enso, and Christian Science Monitor.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2024
JJJJJEROME ELLIS

PROGRAM: Tuesday, February 6th - 7pm
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond

Deep Calls to Deep (2021)
6:00 Minutes, Single-Channel Video
Commissioned and originally presented by REDCAT. 
 
TransCRIPted (2020)
10:00 Minutes, Single-Channel Video
Commissioned by The Poetry Project for their House Party Series. www.poetryproject.org
 
Impediment Is Information (2021)
14:00 Minutes, Single-Channel Video
Created during the 2021 ISSUE Project Room artist residency.
 
Shot on location in the Bighorn Mountains (Wyoming) and Badlands National Park (South Dakota).
 
This music-video-poem work centers on an 18th-century newspaper advertisement for the recapture of a fugitive slave with "an impediment in his speech." A handheld camera captures blurry conifers; a saxophone prays to a mountain. By rearranging the words of the advertisement to create lines of poetry, I am seeking new meanings and sites of resistance in the archive. The work premiered on Juneteenth, a day that recognizes the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. In creating this work for the occasion of Juneteenth, I wanted to celebrate Black freedom practices. I think these practices divinely exceed official proclamations, emancipatory and otherwise.

Responsory; or, when shall we Walk clumsy into the Snow of now (2021)
17:00 Minutes, Single-Channel Video
Created during the 2021 ISSUE Project Room artist residency.
 
This video is intended to honor enslaved ancestors. It contains references to so-called “runaway slave advertisements”: notices placed in 18th and 19th century newspapers with the intention of recapturing enslaved people who escaped from those who were enslaving them.
 
Evensong (2020)
18:00 Minutes, Single-Channel Video
Commissioned for Summer of Music at MacDowell artist residency.
 
Nell Painter and I had a conversation after the work premiered. Watch the conversation here.