Ellen Sperling began studying art at the Brooklyn Museum art school when she was eight years old; she continued there and at Pratt College while still in high school, later studying at Cornell University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She studied painting and drawing, but began to do sculpture on her own, no longer wanting an image of the thing, but the thing itself. She loves this work of articulating the inarticulate, of, in her own way, making the spirit flesh. Though she struggled initially to justify the impulse to make art in a world of poverty, inequality and injustice, she now believes in the power to ‘repair the world’ through art.

She lives in Savannah GA with her partner, Ian—an architect, boat-builder, fellow dreamer—and their dog, Emma.

Collection of Fogg Art Museum, Werner Kramarsky, Harvard Law Library, Boston Public Library, Simmons College, Roxbury Community College, Savannah College of Art and Design, Goldfarb, Abrandt, Salzman & Kutzin, and private collections