Biography

Ellen Fullman (b. 1957, Memphis, Tennessee) feels her devotion to a career in music was initiated at the age of one when Elvis Presley kissed her hand and said, "Hi-ya, baby!" Since 1981, she has collaborated with engineers and instrument builders, experimenting with wire, resonator boxes, and tuning systems to produce an installation, the Long String Instrument, which fills her warehouse studio. Ellen has lived and worked in Seattle since 1997. Fullman holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. She was a guest of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Artists-in-Berlin Program from September 2000-2001. Her music was represented in Volume: Bed of Sound at P.S.1, Queens NY, and at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and in The American Century; Art and Culture, 1950-2000, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. She performed her composition, Stratified Bands: Last Kind Words with the Kronos Quartet in the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco in March 2002. Fullman has written an article on the history of her work, published in November 2002, issue #95 of MusikTexte (Cologne) and in May 2003, issue #85 of MusicWorks (Toronto). In 1985 an LP entitled The Long String Instrument was released on Apollo Records. Her CD releases include Body Music (XI); Suspended Music, in collaboration with Deep Listening Band (Periplum); and Change of Direction (New Albion). She has been the recipient of several awards and commissions including a 1999 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, a Meet the Composer, Reader's Digest Consortium Commission, a NEA Artistıs Projects: New Forms Grant, and a NEA Visual Artists Fellowship in New Genres. Upcoming projects include collaboration with cellist Frances-Marie Uitti in Maastricht, Holland in July 2003. Fullman is recording her songs with Berlin collaborator Jörg Hiller for a release on Choose. A CD of remastered pieces from the late 1980s and improvisations with oboist Eliza Slavet will each be released on Anomalous.