UM School of Music, Theatre & Dance

Chair and Associate Professor of Piano and Piano Pedagogy
jsellis@umich.edu
734-763-1278

Education:
B.Mus., Crane School of Music (SUNY-Potsdam)
M.Mus., Indiana Univ.
D.M.A., Manhattan School of Music

John Ellis is the Director of Graduate Studies in Piano Pedagogy, administers the preparatory department and the class piano curriculum. He is in demand, nationally and internationally, as a master class clinician, adjudicator and lecturer on piano pedagogy. His recent travels have taken him to the University of South Florida, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, and Hawaii. Professor Ellis speaks regularly on pedagogy topics to teachers groups throughout Michigan. As a pianist, he has performed as soloist, lecture-recitalist, and collaborative artist in New York City (Weill Recital Hall, Steinway Hall), Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase, Notre Dame University, Montclair Museum of Art, the University of Helsinki and the Sibelius Academy (Finland), and Freiburg in Breisgau (Germany). He has recorded the piano music of Arthur Cunningham.

As a scholar in the field of pedagogy, Professor Ellis combines music theory, musicology, and the humanities with the more traditional pedagogical methods. He has worked with the Musical Signification Project of the International Congress on Musical Signification (ICMS) since 1996, presenting papers on musical meaning and pedagogy at the University of Bologna, the Université de Provence, the University of Helsinki, and the New England Conference of Music Theorists at Wellesley College. His articles have been published by CLUEB (Bologna)/International Semiotics Institute (Finland), and Acta Semiotica Fennica.

His primary teachers were Mr. Cunningham, Frank Iogha, Michel Block, and Constance Keene. He has served on the faculties at the Manhattan School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. He has taught on the piano faculty of the University of Michigan All-State program at Interlochen and coordinated the piano program at the U-M Summer Arts Institute. Mr. Ellis performed for three years as the pianist for an improvisational comedy group in New York City headed by Kathy Kinney, now featured on The Drew Carey Show.