Richelle
Ellis

Richelle Ellis creates art at the absolute extremes of human exploration. Working as a multidisciplinary artist across painting, sculpture, installation, and film, her practice spans deep space, the deep ocean, and isolated terrestrial environments, bridging seemingly disparate worlds together into a singular tapestry of humanity, technology, and the environment. Her work often explores materiality and process, resulting in singular pieces created in direct response to their extreme environments.

To date, she has completed 13 artworks sent beyond Earth, establishing an unprecedented space mission heritage. She is the first woman with art landed on the Moon and currently has two projects physically on the lunar surface. She has launched projects into near space, etched artworks onto orbital satellites and rockets, sent artwork to the International Space Station, and is slated to be the first person in history to send art to an asteroid in a 2027 mission. She has 10 upcoming lunar, orbital, and interstellar projects.

Ellis does not just create art about exploration; she embeds her work directly into its infrastructure. By treating aerospace missions, scientific expeditions, and analog space habitats as active sites of cultural production, she turns gravity, pressure, and planetary scale into collaborators. Her work frames exploration not as an escape, but as a return—a return to the self, to the planet, and to a deeper sense of belonging within the cosmos. Whether moving through space, descending into the deep ocean, or engaging remote landscapes, her practice reveals how distance can create connection. The journey outward leads us inward—and home.

Her methodology is driven by rigorous field research and partnerships with globally elite organizations. Ellis submerged artworks 5,000 meters beneath the ocean aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too), traversed beyond both the Arctic and Antarctic circles, tested materials in parabolic zero-gravity flights, worked inside the Biosphere 2 research center, and served on multi-month NASA-affiliated astronaut training missions to study the future of off-world habitation.

A recognized leader at the intersection of art and science, Ellis is an Artist Associate at the SETI Institute, a National Council member for the World Wildlife Fund, a Karman Fellow, and Head of Creative Research for analog space programs including HI-SEAS, SENSORA, Astroland Planetary Agency, and Lunares Research Station. Treating advanced industry infrastructure as an extension of her studio practice, she regularly collaborates with organizations among them SpaceX, Blue Origin, Google Quantum AI, Planet Labs, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Relativity Space, Space Perspective, The Aerospace Corporation, and ExLabs.

Ellis’s work has been exhibited globally at institutions including the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, MASS MoCA, Ars Electronica, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the MIT Media Lab, and the New York Hall of Science. She is the Founding Director of the Los Angeles curatorial platform Supercollider, and Co-Founder of Inploration, a non-profit art initiative. Through Inploration, she is Co-Author of Inploration: Art Exploring Space to Understand Earth, a DelMonico-published book dedicated to understanding how art exploring the cosmos ultimately brings us closer to Earth.