Biography

Bryony Ella (née Benge-Abbott, b. 1984) is a Yorkshire-born, Cornwall-based, artist of British and Trinidadian heritage. She has a Fine Art BA from Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology from the University of East Anglia. Today, her interdisciplinary practice moves between the studio, the outdoors and urban public realm spaces, involving cycles of plein-air drawing, mixed-media painting, creative writing and installation-performances as she furthers her own research into embodied ecology as a creative practice.

She regularly collaborates with nature-centred institutions, academics and practitioners to produce participatory and public art projects, which over the past nine years have been presented internationally in locations ranging from museums, galleries and festivals to cathedrals, rainforests and hospitals. Her studio paintings are held in private and public collections, and she has written about her wild drawing practice in Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, which was published in 2024 by Bloomsbury with the Right to Roam campaign. She continues to write both for film and performance projects, as well as on the Embodied Ecology Substack.

Currently, Bryony Ella is the research artist on a long-term, international, Wellcome funded project (Melting Metropolis) with environmental historians at the University of Liverpool and Queens College City University of New York. This role involves co-supervising a PhD looking at embodied geographies of heat in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and mentoring community storytellers in London and New York. Her first installation for Melting Metropolis, My Body is a Sundial, is currently on display at Orleans House Gallery, London, and she is writing and directing a new multi-disciplinary live performance, Stand of the Sun: a solstice ritual for the melting metropolis. This year she is also a ReWild Yourself Champion with the Voice for Nature campaign.

Bryony Ella’s artist practice builds upon a curatorial and project management background at institutions such as The Women’s Library and Wellcome Collection, which culminated 2016-2020 when she established the inaugural exhibition programme at the UK’s largest scientific research lab, The Francis Crick Institute. In 2019, her commitment to science engagement 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.

Since then, she has worked 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, Octopus Energy, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, LDA Design, Oxford City Council, Islington Council and Fusion Arts Oxford.