Ella Guru

Ella Guru
Photo of Ella Guru by Charles Thomson
Born	(1966-05-24) May 24, 1966 (age 50) Ohio, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Ohio State University
Known for	Painting
Movement	Stuckism

Ella Guru (born May 24, 1966) is an American painter and musician living in Hastings, United Kingdom. She was a member of Mambo Taxi and the Voodoo Queens. In 1999, she became one of the founding members of the Stuckist art movement.

Guru was born in the U.S. state of Ohio. She did a commercial art course at Fort Hayes Career Center (1982–84) and attended Columbus College of Art and Design (1984–86), which she left because of "all the conceptual crap". She graduated in fine arts from Ohio State University (1988–89), where she received the Visual Arts Award.

From 1990 to 1991, she worked as a go-go dancer and stripper, and travelled to Africa and India, then for the next year lived an Islamic lifestyle in an Algerian household in Islington, London, where she was a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. She has lived in London since this time. In 1996, she rode a bicycle to Lithuania, and met Sexton Ming in London, after borrowing his lipstick. In 1997, she worked as a web site designer. In 2001, she married Ming on a Dorset cliff top; they wore drag. Her daughter Lucy was born in 2004.

She has been an habituée of fetish clubs, where she used to spank men, whom she terms "Tory politicians". She had lunch in New York with Quentin Crisp, who said she was "weird". Guru's pseudonym is taken from a Captain Beefheart song on the album Trout Mask Replica.

In the early 1990s, Guru was a guitarist in the London-based British band, Mambo Taxi, linked with Riot Grrrl. The inspiration for the band came from UK garage rock and US punk, and their sound was a mixture of garage, punk, and pop. The name was a reference to the Mambo Taxi used by the heroine of the film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Guru in an interview with NME’s Sam Stallard in 1992, said the name was "tacky", and "with all sorts of different things in it that sort of clash, but everything’s useful as well as fun."