He has worked both as a TV producer and a media academic. In 1982 he was one of the first independent producers commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK, making their Visions series through Large Door. The company continued in production until 1999 and during that time he served as vice-chair of the independent producers’ association PACT. His books on TV and cinema include Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000) and Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (2012). He has led several research projects into television, culminating in the ADAPT project for the European Research Council (2013-8) which studied how television used to be made using an innovative method outlined in our book Hands On Media History (Hall & Ellis, 2018). Currently Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, he lead a team in the StoryFutures project devoted to improving the flow of metadata in audio-visual production. He chairs Learning on Screen which runs the UK’s largest streaming archive of digitized UK TV, Box of Broadcasts for UK education, and he is an editor-in-chief of VIEW, the online journal of European TV history.

> At the ZDOK Special conference, John Ellis will join the panel discussion with Mirjam von Arx, Ohad Landesman and Christian Frei, moderated by Christian Iseli (head of the research project Gadgets, Phones and Drones).