carson ellis

Carson Ellis was born in 1975 in Vancouver, Canada. She was raised in suburban New York and college-educated at the Univeristy of Montana in Missoula, where she earned a BFA in Painting in 1998.

She was a bartender and an oil painter when, in 2001, her now husband, Colin Meloy, put her to work making art for The Decemberists. What started as a small project undertaken in her spare time quickly developed into a big job. As the band’s illustrator-in-residence, she has created flyers and posters, website illustrations, t-shirt designs, backdrop and stage set designs, video props, and, all told, 18 record covers.

Happily, all this work led her to a career in illustration. These days she mostly divides her time between children’s book illustration, artwork for the Decemberists, and, once in a great while, fine art for exhibiting.