John Ellis

Professor John Stephen Ellis, who joined Wentworth in September 1988, established Wentworth’s first semester abroad program in 1990. He co-founded l’Atelier Des Griots with his colleague Habib Meme, a Béninese architect and Wentworth alum. L’Atelier Des Griots is an international non-profit studio devoted to the study and implementation of low-tech ecological urban architecture and planning.

Their organization, which draws upon the West African tradition of the griot – telling the many stories of the community through the medium of art, architecture and urbanism – has inspired a number of courses including the graduate storytelling and architecture elective that Ellis is currently teaching at Wentworth.

Ellis has also taught graduate global research travel studios since 2014. Each fall since 2017, John has taken Wentworth students to Bénin where he was a Fulbright Scholar for the academic year 2016 to 2017. The many relationships he created while living in West Africa have made it possible for him to share those connections with his students.

Through his research on informal settlements in West Africa, he sought to understand and communicate how a community manages to build and recreate itself, both in terms of physical building and community building, within the confines of only using found materials and without guidance from the government or other external sources.

He considers his Fulbright year as both the most difficult and the most rewarding experience of his life. Over time, he learned how to be more open and more fluid in his thinking as he slowly abandoned pre-conceived expectations about life in West Africa.

“Life is an ever-changing work in progress, and I am grateful to the Fulbright Program and to the people of Bénin for all the gifts of change they bestowed on me,” says Ellis.

For the past several years, Ellis has served on the National Screening Committee for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and U.S. Scholar Peer Review. In this position, John has been surprised by the low number of applicants in architecture, engineering, and other related fields like interior design especially since the opportunities are vast.

John hopes to encourage Wentworth students to apply for Fulbright grants, as well as work with potential visiting scholars in architecture, to build a more robust research-based academic environment here at Wentworth.