Ellie Ga (New York City, 1976) is an artist and writer. Her narrative based-videos and performances are told through everyday conversations, poetic sidesteps and obsessive research. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts: from the submerged ruins of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria (Square Octagon Circle) and the charting of the quotidian in the frozen Arctic Ocean (The Fortunetellers) to a study of messages in bottles, both as tools for studying oceans currents and as metaphor for exile (Strophe, A Turning; Gyres 1-3). In Quarries, stories of resistance are extracted from unlikely places and found on overlooked surfaces including the mysteries of prehistoric stone tools to the labor of stone masons who paved the streets of Lisbon.
Ga is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video and her work Gyres was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial of American Art. Previously, she was the recipient of a Swedish Research Council artistic research grant. In 2019, She was a FLAD artist in residence at AIR 351, Cascais. Recent exhibitions include Gyres at Galeria ZDB, Lisbon and in 2022 Quarries premiered at Jeu de Paume, Paris; Bureau, New York and FID documentary film festival, Marseille.