Draft:Jjjjjerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis (born 1989 ) is an American multi-instrumentalist, writer, composer, and disability advocate.

Early life and education
Ellis was born in 1989 in Connecticut to Jamaican and Grenadian parents. He was raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and studied music theory at Columbia University.

Career
Ellis received a Fulbright fellowship in 2015 to study samba in Salvador, Brazil, and is a two-time MacDowell Fellow. In 2022, he received the United States Artists Fellowship as well as a Creative Capital award. He has taught at Yale University as a lecturer in Sound Design, and in 2024 he received an honorary doctorate from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Artistic practice and influences
Ellis spells his first name with five J's as a way of honoring the fact that he often stutters the most on his name. His work spans photography, poetry, and music, exploring themes of divinity, time, and the politics of Black dysfluency. He references Black liturgical traditions and improvisational practices, influenced by his grandfather, a Pentecostal minister. He also cites Saidiya Hartman, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Christina Sharpe as influences.

Publications and works
Ellis's debut album and songbook, The Clearing, originated from his essay "The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time," published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies in 2020. His second book, Aster of Ceremonies, published by Milkweed Editions in October 2023, is a collection of poems, prayers, and essays addressing "escaped slave advertisements" and stuttering. Specifically, the work deals with advertisements referencing enslaved people who were said to have spoken with a stutter. His second studio album, Compline in Nine Movements, is an improvisational piano album.

Advocacy
Ellis is active in the stuttering pride community, which repositions stuttering as a valuable way of speaking. He was part of the team that developed the stuttering pride flag and founded People Who Stutter Create to design the billboard for the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

Personal life
His wife is ecologist and poet Luísa Black Ellis. They live in Norfolk, Virginia.