Ellen Pearlman

Ellen Pearlman is affiliated with nine UTNE Magazine awards for Independent Publishing and is one of the founders of both The Brooklyn Rail and Tricycle Magazine. The Asian Cultural Council awarded her a grant to investigate Tibetan sacred dance in most nomadic Eastern Tibet and to create a documentary film on the subject as a result of her work in India, Russia, Sikkim, Nepal, France, England, Germany, and the Netherlands for Tibetan Sacred Dance, the first book in the English language on the subject.

Winner of a Canadian Banff Mountain Culture Grant, and a Banff Canadian Center Writer's residency, she has also been a four-time Vermont Studio Center Special President's Fellow, a writing resident at the Great River Arts Colony in Patzcuaro, Mexico as well as a guest at the Repino Arts Colony in St. Petersburg, Russia. Admitted into the international residency at the Red Gate Artist Colony in Beijing, China. Ellen has just finished her manuscript on the Chinese contemporary arts scene titled "Eating Scorpions, A Whirlwind Romp Through China's Art Circus". She was invited back to China by the government sponsored Chinese Photographers Association to take photos in Guangxi Zhang Autonomous Region, and to Taipei, Taiwan to present a paper at the Taiwanese Photographer's International Symposium. She is a regular arts contributor to Time Out Beijing in English and has worked with the prominent curator and critic Victoria Lu on the Moon River Museum of Contemporary Art as well as Yuanfen Gallery, the very first gallery of new media in Beijing. Ellen has also lectured on New Media at the Communications and Animation University in Beijing.

A finalist for the 2006 Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, she is currently completing a new book for Wesleyan University Press "Nothing and Everying" on the influence on Buddhist thought on American modernism. She is an editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail, a magazine of politics, art and culture which won the 2007 Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Publishing Grant. A Breadloaf Writer's Conference Scholar recommended by the late poet Allen Ginsberg, she attended The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and The Iowa Writer's Workshop. Ellen studied photography and video at The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The International Center of Photography (ICP), and anthropological film at Harvard University. She was the photographer for Harvard Medical School as part of an American Institute of Indian Studies grant researching Tibetan Tumo or heat yogis. She has taught at Columbia University, The M.A. Program in Digital Design at Parsons School of Design and at The New School University.

Ellen received a black belt in Taijitsu (Ninja) under the auspices of Black Belt Hall of Fame Ninja Master Shidoshi Steven Hayes. She is listed in the current edition of Who's Who in America.