Ellen Maddow
Ellen Maddow has been working in the theatre in New York as a writer, composer, and performer for the last fifty years. Born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of a screenwriter and a modern dancer, she attended Hollywood High School and received a B.A. in theatre from Antioch College in Ohio. She was a member of the Open Theatre from 1971-1973, performing in Terminal, Mutation Show, and Nightwalk.
Ellen is a founding member of the Talking Band. Works she has written for the company include Triplicity; Shimmer and Herringbone (with Paul Zimet); Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless; Efflorescence; Fusiform Gyrus – A Septet For Two Scientists and Five Horns; Fat Skirt Big Nozzle(with Louise Smith); Burnished by Grief; The Golden Toad (with Paul Zimet); The Peripherals; Panic! Euphoria! Blackout; Flip Side; Delicious Rivers;Painted Snake In A Painted Chair; and five pieces about the avant-garde housewife, Betty Suffer.
In addition to writing music for a number of the works mentioned above, she wrote the scores for for Talking Band’s production of The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles; The City of No Illusions; The Room Sings; Marcellus Shale; Taylor Mac’s The Walk Across America For Mother Earth; and Liz Duffy Adam’s Buccaneers (Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis) among others.
She performed in Existentialism created and directed by Anne Bogart at La Mama, and The Following Evening written and directed by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone at PAC-NYC.
She received a Drama Desk Award for her performance in Clare Barron’s Dance Nation at Playwrights Horizons, and also performed in the Steppenwolf production in Chicago.
Ellen is a recipient of the 2025 Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award from the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation; an OBIE Lifetime Achievement Award; and a 2020 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award for Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless.
She is also a recipient of a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship; a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship; The Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theatre; and the NEA/TCG Award for Playwrights.
She is an alumnus of New Dramatists.
