Present Preoccupations

Tesni Ellis is a scholar living in Trent Hills, Ontario. Ours is a rural region connected by the Trent River, alive with rolling hills, farmland, and a vibrant arts community.

I create and animate multidisciplinary, intergenerational spaces for people to come together. Through artistic practice, I enable groups and individuals to think, tell stories, and make sense of the world and their experiences. I am continuously inspired by what can emerge between strangers, communities, and students, through working with materials in our hands.

I am presently a PhD Candidate in language, culture, and teaching at York University’s Faculty of Education. I hold a doctoral fellowship award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for my project, “Drawing Towards Each Other”. Blending curriculum inquiry and artistic practice, my study brought post-secondary students together to form drawing groups to explore drawing practice as a way to relate to each other and their world. A group of strangers, drawing together without wondering what the ‘point’ was – it was fun, exploratory, and even a bit subversive. A bit like how we all drew as children.

I’m extending my arts-based inquiry into community as a member of the Board of Directors at the Ah! Arts and Heritage Centre of Warkworth. I’m keen to create research initiatives and events for community members to contribute, generate, and witness artefacts that express and complicate the histories, practices, and knowledges that sustain the land and peoples of Northumberland County and beyond.

I also teach Professional Communication online at Northern Lakes College (NLC) in Slave Lake, Alberta. NLC’s distance education takes a holistic approach to increase access to post-secondary education for students from rural areas and across Alberta. In my course, I introduce students to principles of effective communication and business writing with an ethos that communication sustains not only professional activities but all healthy relationships.

Some History

I completed my Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Communication Studies while living at home in suburban Ottawa. Raised by writer/filmmaker parents turned communication consultants, I was always invested in artistic expression as a way of knowing and being. From Dad, I learned the power of a good story; from Mom, I learned to also listen carefully for what’s not said. I grew up participating in theatre, children’s choirs, and school bands. These collective experiences inform the way I approach and understand education – that it’s something we do with others. These days, I’ve found my way back to visual arts – back, because all of us begin with an impulse to make a mark on a surface. I’m an artistic nomad, willing to try my hands at anything. But writing has always been the form that gives clarity to my thought and experience. I’m a writer.

I moved to Toronto, where I was born, in 2012 to pursue a Master of Arts in Communication and Culture at York University. I didn’t know what graduate studies was about, but I’m forever glad for what and who it introduced to me. For my SSHRC-awarded master’s project “Media-Making at Youville Centre”, I taught digital storytelling to a group of young moms at a non-profit, alternative education centre. This was a scene for my becoming an educator and facilitator of artful personal narratives. Through participants’ generous creative expressions, I witnessed the crafting, shaping, and negotiating of one’s personal story being mediated by the form those narratives were constructed through. I also came to understand I have a way about me for helping others say something they didn’t necessarily know they needed to say.

Afterwards, I worked as leader in a communications/marketing team at Toronto Metropolitan University in the division of student affairs; later I worked with an exceptional team of thinkers in the Office of Innovation. At TMU, which I knew as Ryerson, I led teams of staff and students creating multimedia works to share resources, opportunities, stories, challenges, and insights. Some of my most memorable projects include co-creating the Student Experience Research Team and mentoring the RU Student Life team of student creators. I still think fondly of our days in a basement office, students and I, dreaming up different ways to connect with a diverse audience and give them something to hold onto, if only for a while, in the frenzied, fragmented landscape of higher ed.

I loved being around students even when I was no longer one myself; it’s part of why I chose to study education for my doctoral degree. That way of being – open to the new, carrying on even a bit obsessively about a topic or idea – taught me something enduring about living.

Making things with students also inspired the project I’m completing now and what I’m daydreaming about making possible here in Northumberland County and elsewhere, in the future.

Want to know more, connect, or collaborate? Do that here.