Lindsay Ellis American YouTuber Born 1984 in Johnson City

Early life

Lindsay Carole Ellis was born on 24 November 1984 in Johnson City, Tennessee, and grew up there as an only child. She attended Science Hill High School. During her teenage years she became acquainted, through an online fanfiction community, with three people who would later work with her on creative projects: Antonella Inserra, Elisa Hansen and Angelina Meehan.

Ellis went on to study film. She completed a bachelor's degree in film studies at New York University in 2007 and then earned a master of fine arts degree from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2011.

Career

Ellis's earliest public work overlapped with her graduate studies. From 2008 to 2014 she hosted The Nostalgia Chick, a web series produced under the Channel Awesome banner and modelled on an existing review show called the Nostalgia Critic. She made more than one hundred episodes before leaving in 2014 to concentrate on longer video essays. In 2010 she wrote and directed The A-Word, a short documentary about women's experiences with abortion, which was shown at the IFC Center in 2012 as part of its DocuWeek programme. Working with Hansen, Inserra and viewers of her series 50 Shades of Green, she also wrote Awoken, a paranormal romance parody of Twilight about a woman who falls for Cthulhu, published under the pseudonym Serra Elinsen.

On her own YouTube channel, Ellis made many videos about Walt Disney Pictures films. Among her better-known series are The Whole Plate, an extended look at the Transformers films and the career of Michael Bay, and a three-part study of the making of The Hobbit films and their effect on the New Zealand film industry. A separate series, Loose Canon, follows how literary and film characters are reinterpreted over time. From 2017 her channel concentrated on film-focused video essays, produced with a small team of part-time staff, and she also made videos about working as a YouTube creator. She co-hosted the web series It's Lit! with fellow YouTuber Princess Weekes for PBS Digital Studios, a companion to the broadcaster's The Great American Read that examined trends in American literature.

Ellis was one of the founders of the Standard creator community, alongside Dave Wiskus, CGP Grey, Philipp Dettmer and others. Much of her later work has appeared on Standard's Nebula streaming service, including an extended cut of her essay on Tom Hooper's Les Misérables, and she releases material early to supporters on Patreon, where she has more than 9,000 patrons.

Her online career has included periods of harassment. In 2021 she published a Patreon post titled "Walking away from Omelas", announcing her retirement from YouTube and content creation and citing online harassment. She spoke publicly about the period at VidCon in June 2022, and in October 2022 she released her first video essay in nearly a year on Nebula, about the Lord of the Rings films. She returned to YouTube in 2024 while continuing to publish on Nebula. In 2025 she released a video about the children's entertainer Ms. Rachel and the situation in Gaza, through which she raised more than 850,000 dollars for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

Ellis also moved into fiction and audio. In early 2020 she co-founded MusicalSplaining, a podcast on which she and the director and illustrator Kaveh Taherian discussed a different musical every two weeks; O, The Oprah Magazine included it among its twenty top new podcasts of 2020. Her debut novel, Axiom's End, a science fiction story set in 2007, was published by St. Martin's Press on 21 July 2020. It entered The New York Times Best Seller list at number seven on 9 August and also appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal lists. It is the first of a planned five-book series called Noumena. Truth of the Divine followed in 2021 and Apostles of Mercy in 2024, with a further volume titled Degenerates announced without a date.

Recognition

The Hobbit Duology, a three-part documentary from 2018 that Ellis wrote and edited with Angelina Meehan, was a finalist for the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Related Work. Following the release of Axiom's End, Ellis was shortlisted for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, which is presented during the Hugo Award ceremonies.

Personal life

Ellis lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband. They have two children.