Curtis Ellis
| Curtis Ellis | |
|---|---|
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Ellis at the 68th Annual Peabody Awards
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| Born |
15 December 1979 Portland, Oregon, USA |
| Occupation | Executive Director, FoodCorps |
Curtis Cleland 'Curt' Ellis (born December 15, 1979) is an American filmmaker, social entrepreneur, and advocate for sustainable agriculture and healthy food. He serves as co-founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit organization FoodCorps. He shared a Peabody Award in 2008 for King Corn, which he co-produced and starred in, and in 2011 he won the Heinz Award for his work in the sustainable food movement.
Ellis was born in Lake Oswego, Oregon to attorney Barnes Ellis and teacher Beatrice Ellis The youngest of six children, Ellis attended Lakeridge High School in Oregon and The Mountain School in Vermont, then earned a B.A. in History from Yale College.
Ellis co-created and starred in the 2007 Mosaic Films documentary, King Corn. The film, which the Washington Post called "Required viewing for anyone planning to visit a supermarket, fast-food joint, or their own refrigerator,” followed Ellis and his best friend Ian Cheney on a yearlong quest to grow an acre of corn and trace its journey into food. Directed by Ellis' cousin Aaron Woolf, King Corn featured journalist Michael Pollan and Nixon-era Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz. It received a limited theatrical release, aired nationally on PBS Independent Lens and won a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award.
In the 2009 sequel Big River: A King Corn Companion, directed by Ellis and co-produced by Ellis and Woolf, Ellis and Cheney returned to Iowa to investigate the ecological impacts of chemical-intensive agriculture. The film featured Yale University scientist John Wargo and geneticist Wes Jackson in its examination of the hypoxic dead zone and the link between herbicides and cancer. Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben called Big River "a sharp and clever reminder that nothing ever really goes away, certainly not the soup of chemicals we're pouring on our fields."Big River aired on Planet Green in 2010.
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