Miriam Ellis

Miriam Ellis, Ph.D, is Lecturer Emerita (currently called back to service), at UC Santa Cruz, where she taught French language and theater for over 30 years, was stage director for the UCSC Opera Workshop, and founded the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse (MEIP). Now in its 17th season, MEIP is the only multilingual program in academia which produces annual fully-staged theater performances in several languages (with English super-titles) on the same bill. Dr. Ellis has translated seven...See more

Miriam Ellis, Ph.D, is Lecturer Emerita (currently called back to service), at UC Santa Cruz, where she taught French language and theater for over 30 years, was stage director for the UCSC Opera Workshop, and founded the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse (MEIP). Now in its 17th season, MEIP is the only multilingual program in academia which produces annual fully-staged theater performances in several languages (with English super-titles) on the same bill. Dr. Ellis has translated seven complete opera librettos for performance, most of which have been performed in English, as well as many arias for the texts of concert and recital programs that she produced for the Young Artists Series of the Santa Cruz Opera Society, Inc. (SCOSI). Together with Dr. Sherwood Dudley, she founded this group in 1976, and it has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Dr. Ellis frequently contributes her opera translations to on-line sites, such as the Aria Database, and is on the editorial board of ResMusica, a daily online international journal devoted to classical music and dance, for which she has translated concert and opera reviews, interviews, and various other texts. Over the course of her career at UCSC, Dr. Ellis served as guide and interpreter for Eugène Ionesco, famed French playright of the Absurd, during his month-long campus residency in May, 1979. She also served as translator and interpreter for Mme Danielle Mitterand, wife of then French President François Mitterand, who visited campus in 1989 and presented a public lecture for a large audience. In 2000, Dr. Ellis was awarded the medal and title of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques by the French government. Since 2002, Dr. Ellis has taught courses devoted to musical theater, opera history, Romanticism, and other literary and artistic movements, for the Lifelong Learners affiliated with UCSC (now the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCSC). See less