Bio
Ellen Lake received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2002, where she studied sculpture, painting, film & video, and installation. She is a recipient of a 2023 Alameda County Arts Leadership Award, 2016 Artists Activating Communities Grant from the California Arts Council, a 2015 and 2016 City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program Individual Artist Grant, 2014 Alternative Exposure/Southern Exposure Grant for Bench Projects, 2012 Residency Award at Stanford University’s Experimental Media Arts Lab, 2009 Sarah Jacobson Film Grant and 2005/2006 Bay Area Video Coalition’s Mediamaker Award. Recent artist residencies include Cow House Studios (2025), Studios at MASS MoCA (2024), Vermont Studio Center (2022), and Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida (2018). Her work has shown at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Interface Gallery, Walker Art Center, Exit Art, Crawl Space, Everson Museum, Heaven Gallery, Arizona State University Art Museum, Aurora Picture Show, Sumter Gallery of Art, AC [Institute Direct Chapel], Kala Art Institute and Disposable Film Festival. Additional work has shown at Pacific Film Archive, the Exploratorium, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and internationally at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Center for Digital Art in Holon, Israel. Ellen is currently the Co-Executive Director of Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and her studio and home are in North Oakland, California.