Brian Ellis is a creative coder, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. His artistic drive lies in using code to democratize creative expression.

He founded the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble to explore this concept through the medium of dance, and to expand the possibilities of movement-based musical interfaces. He also built and maintains motion-into-midi.com, an open-source tool that lets anyone do motion capture on their laptop. Brian maintains many performance practices, incorporating classical guitar, mountain dulcimer, live electronics, and no-input-mixing into his solo practice, and he is an active ensemble member and improviser with many groups.

As a composer, Brian focuses on writing interactive solo and chamber music, and has worked with Third Coast Percussion,Chromic Duo, Unheard-of Ensemble, Apply Triangle, theSubaerial Collective, the Playground Ensemble, and members of zFestival and SōSI. He has presented works and workshops with Lincoln Center, the NY Philharmonic, 21st Century Guitar Conference, ICMC, TURN UP, SEAMUS, MICC, SPLICE,NYU-ITP, NYCEMF, and ROCC.

Brian completed his undergraduate studies in Music and Computer Science Honors at the University of Texas at Austin where he studied with Nina Young, Celil Refik Kaya, and Russell Pinkston, and he most recently studied with David Coll, and Sky Macklay and Mary Kouyoumdjian at Peabody.