About
Bryony Ella’s studio designs and directs public realm ritual-spaces and performances that respond to global climate and ecological collapse. Working collaboratively in the liminal space between science and spirituality, the studio’s touring and site-specific installations illuminate stories of community and belonging that are grounded in nature, yet integrate the realms of imagination, mythology and awe with tangible, lived experiences and academic data. Together, they express myriad ways of understanding what it means to be human in a more-than-human world today.
In the studio, Bryony Ella works with an ecocentric and decolonial gaze to create paintings that consider the human body as a site of transformation; an experience that is fluid, dynamic, porous and intimately connected to all living systems. These works are guided by her ‘wild drawing’ practice, which prioritises sensorial experiences of environment over observational studies.
Both sites of practice weave throughout the other to inspire, inform and shape a body of work that celebrates, above all else, human-nature interconnectedness.
Biography & CV
Bryony Ella is a Yorkshire-born artist of British and Trinidadian heritage. Her studio is based in Cornwall, South West England. She has a Fine Art BA from Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology from the University of East Anglia.
Since founding her studio in 2018, Ella’s work has been presented internationally in locations ranging from museums, galleries and festivals to cathedrals, rainforests and hospitals. She has developed touring and permanent installations across the UK, participatory art programmes in the United States and Caribbean, and regularly writes about her ‘embodied ecology’ practice, through which she shares creative approaches to deepening experiences of kinship with nature.
Alongside her studio painting practice, Ella works with nature-centred academics to design and direct research-inspired public realm artworks. These collaborations build upon a background curating and project managing exhibition programmes for social history museums and science institutions, culminating in the role of Public Engagement Manager at the UK’s largest research lab, The Francis Crick Institute.
Since then, her studio has produced public realm projects with organisations such as the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the British Ecological Society, University College London, Butterfly Conservation, the Grantham Institute – Climate and the Environment at Imperial College London, William Morris Gallery, Patagonia, COCO Dance Festival Trinidad, Right to Roam, Octopus Energy, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, LDA Design, Oxford City Council, Islington Council and Fusion Arts Oxford, amongst others. In 2019, Ella’s commitment to science engagement with a social justice focus through public art was acknowledged by the Mayor of London, who highlighted her as part of the city’s centenary International Women’s Day celebrations.
Currently, Ella is Research Artist and public engagement lead for the international Wellcome Trust-funded project Melting Metropolis, which studies environmental and community histories of urban heat and health. Working within a team of historians and geographers at the University of Liverpool and Queens College City University of New York, Ella designs and delivers creative programmes inspired by their academic research. She is also mentor for Melting Metropolis’ community storytellers in London and New York, and co-supervisor of an embodied geographies of heat PhD research project in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Image credits: Ewelina Ruminska, 2026
