Greg Jones Ellis

About Greg Jones Ellis

 Greg Jones Ellis received a 2017 Julie Harris Playwriting Award for his comedy-drama All Save One, set in Hollywood in the 1950s.  The play was first performed as a staged reading at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was then chosen by the Washington Stage Guild as a World Premiere production during its 2018-19 season.  His previous plays include Divinity Place, which received its World Premiere in 2017 at the North Street Playhouse in Onancock, Virginia.  Based on the playwright’s parents’ wedding, the comedy, set during WWII, is published by Stage Rights (https://www.stagerights.com/allshows/divinity-place/). He collaborated with the late Michael Lee Stockler on a musical version of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear titled Lying Together, as well as an industrial musical commissioned by Robert Moss, co-founder of New York’s famed Playwrights Horizons, for the Meriwether’s restaurant chain.

Among his most recent works are a double bill of one-act plays: the first act is an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s short story Roman Fever; this is followed by an original comedy entitled Culver City Fever. His contemporary drama about the tragic consequences of a daytime talk show, Dead Air, was performed as a reading at the 2019 Page-to-Stage Festival.   

Greg is also a theatre scholar and teacher. He has published theatre-related articles, including a peer-reviewed analysis of Langston Hughes’s monologue poems entitled “The Lifelong Dinner Guest of the Negro Vogue” and profiles of playwrights Marsha Norman and Paul Zindel for Biography magazine. He created a 10-week course, “10 Plays Everyone Should Know,” for the Osher Institute for Lifetime Learning that proved so popular that two “sequel” courses have followed. 

He earned his B.A. (magna cum laude) in Drama at Catholic University and an M.A. (with high honors) in English Literature from Salisbury University.  He also studied cinema with renowned film historian William K. Everson at New York University and playwriting with Lucas Hnath (A Doll’s House Part 2) at Stony Brook University.