James Marc Ellis is a Toronto-based pianist, composer, and multidisciplinary artist whose work lives at the intersection of classical training, contemporary songwriting, and narrative performance. With roots in sacred music and a career shaped by both concert halls and unconventional stages, Ellis brings a distinctly cinematic sensibility to music-making…richly emotive, structurally bold, and unapologetically personal.

Trained as a pianist and music director from a young age, Ellis was once the youngest Assistant Church Music Director in Canada, a role that sharpened his command of large-scale musical architecture, vocal accompaniment, and collaborative performance. Over time, his work evolved beyond liturgical settings into original compositions, live performance, and hybrid storytelling formats that blur the line between concert, memoir, and theatre.

As an artist, Ellis is drawn to contrast; precision and chaos, restraint and release, tradition and rupture. His music often fuses classical piano foundations with modern harmonic language, lyrical narrative, and an undercurrent of defiance shaped by lived experience. Themes of identity, erasure, survival, and reclamation recur throughout his work, giving his compositions both intimacy and urgency.
In addition to composing and performing, Ellis is an experienced music educator, accompanist, and collaborator, known for his intuitive musicianship and ability to support singers and ensembles with sensitivity and clarity. Whether at the piano, on the page, or on stage, his work is guided by one central belief: art is not decoration. It is testimony.

Ellis continues to develop new musical and interdisciplinary projects in Toronto, expanding a body of work that treats music not merely as sound, but as narrative force.