Biography

Bryony Ella (née Benge-Abbott, b. 1984) is a Yorkshire-born interdisciplinary artist of British and Trinidadian heritage. She has a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology from the University of East Anglia.

Currently, Bryony is the Research Artist on a five year environmental history project that is looking at the lived experience of urban heat islands in New York, London and Paris. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Bloomsbury book by the UK Right to Roam campaign, ‘Wild Service: Why Nature Needs Us’.

Alongside her studio painting practice, Bryony has developed a public realm practice that focuses on public engagement with ecological and climate science. Over the past nine years, often in collaboration with groups of academics, artists and activists, she has created numerous participatory public art projects integrating film, sculpture, creative writing, music and dance. These artworks have been shown internationally in venues ranging from museums, galleries and festivals to locations as diverse as St Paul’s Cathedral and Great Ormond Street Hospital, to a Tobagonian rainforest wildlife sanctuary and a research submarine exploring the Mariana Trench.

Her public engagement experience builds on a background creating exhibitions at institutions such as The Women’s Library and the Wellcome Collection, culminating in establishing a public exhibition programme at the UK’s largest lab, The Francis Crick Institute. There, in collaboration with world-leading biomedical researchers, she brought in artists, designers, patient groups and community partners to co-create multidisciplinary and multi-voiced exhibitions exploring human health and disease.

Bryony’s commitment to science engagement through public art was acknowledged in 2019 by the Mayor of London, who highlighted her work as part of the city’s centenary International Women’s Day celebrations. Since then, she has produced creative projects with organisations such as the British Council Americas, the British Ecological Society, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Butterfly Conservation, the William Morris Gallery, the Grantham Institute - Climate and the Environment at Imperial College London, LDA Design and Octopus Energy.

She lives and works between the UK and New York.