by far the longest stretch of time since I first created this blog nearly 10 years ago. May 2020 was the last time I wrote about my life in any detail. I was only one existential crisis into quarantine. I had just finished trying to outrun covid in Hawaii and rural Utah and decided to move away from LA to Portland. There was a lot of change and instability as I tried to adjust to what my new life was. My life had so much momentum up until the shut down, and then it was filled with such sudden and overwhelming… nothingness. Lots of space to think but for whatever reason, I couldn’t really muster the energy to write here.
Portland was a great decision in a lot of ways. I moved into my best friend's house in a beautiful city surrounded by nature after living alone in East Hollywood. My life, like many, had abruptly moved online. Irl was replaced with dozens of group chats, Twitch streams and late night Among Us sessions. I played (and almost won) group chat Survivor. I “dated” people on Zoom. And I co-founded a radical editing collective called Racer Trash.
It’s hard to imagine Racer Trash existing outside of the extreme confines of early quarantine. I really feel like we tapped into a tremendous energy together at the exact right moment in time, with no idea what we were doing whatsoever.
In a nutshell, Racer Trash was a group of creatives, mostly filmmakers and editors, who worked together to re-imagine beloved films and shows. We worked exquisite corpse style, dividing up a movie into segments aka “segs” that were randomly assigned to each person. We typically worked independently of each other and wouldn’t know what the final product was until it was all stitched together at the end. We streamed our creations online on Twitch to a rapidly growing audience.
It started just like everything else at that time in my life; via a random group chat. Confused about what was happening when I was told we were “re-editing” Speed Racer, I thought I was just being asked to color grade someone else’s film. So that’s what I did. I color graded and did simple VFX for about half of what was our first film, “Speed Vapor”. You can watch the whole thing below if you want (and more here). I was just beginning to do color grading in general, so it was a great way to practice and hone that skill for me in a creative way. I had no idea I was also creating an aesthetic that would be permanently linked to everything we’d ever make and emulated by dozens of other editors. Or that there would even be an “everything we’d ever make” that meant anything to anyone else…
It was easy for Racer Trash to become my life and I loved it. I felt like I had finally found my elusive community of creatives. And I finally had the time to develop all these skills I had been wanting to explore for years. The biggest one being editing.
After doing color grading for our first 2 films, I wanted to branch out and try editing my own seg for the film whose premiere also served as my defacto birthday party, ID4.MP4 (Independence Day). I still remember how gleefully happy I was when I worked on that, actually making myself laugh out loud while editing in Premiere. It was a really magical moment for me during a dark time and one that propelled me even further down the path of video as an artform. 1.5 years and 30+ feature films later, our crowning (and final) achievement was being invited to premiere 3 films at TIFF for Midnight Madness followed by a commissioned installation and premiere at Cucalores Film Festival. There is a lot to be proud of.
I worked on a whole lot during my quaran-time with Racer Trash, these are a few of the things I worked on that in retrospect were pretty pivotal to me in some way or another. Whether it was mastering a new technique (writing and recording songs, singing, dancing, you name it) or inspiring someone to commission me to create something similar, these videos ended up being really important. Beginning with the clumsy chaos that was my first edit to the poetry that was one of my last, a beautiful collaboration with my partner for our final installation.
Working in video was incredibly liberating for me.
When quarantine started I was suddenly very alone and had no way to get anywhere I wanted to be. My creative outlet more or less vanished and there was nowhere nearby to go since everything was shut down. It was a very claustrophobic feeling in more ways than one, and getting out of LA was very helpful. At least in Portland I could easily get to beautiful hiking trails without a car. Forest Park was my go to, it’s one of the largest urban forests in the United States and it’s right in the middle of the city.
After watching my partner’s film “Houses”, I became fascinated with the analog video effects done by our friend Paul Cornett. I wanted to learn as much as I could about how to create them. I consulted with some glitch artists, ordered a CRT TV on eBay and a glitch box that my friend and fellow Racer Trash editor David Jackson soldered together for me in exchange for a bottle of wine.
I couldn’t get any of my gear to work for over a month. I ordered 3 soon to be broken VCRs in the span of weeks. It was maddening but eventually I figured out what the hell I was doing and from that moment on I was hooked. I moved back to LA in the fall and dedicated a whole room in my apartment to my new studio setup. And then I started getting hired to do creative editing work, as well as a ton of color grading gigs, mostly due to the success and exposure of my work with Racer Trash. I felt incredibly lucky to be spending most of my time working on creatively fulfilling video work, and not just for clients. 6 months later I would be selling my video art to collectors for the first time.
Initially the concept of selling my video art made no sense to me at all, which alone was intriguing enough to warrant my interest. The average person still had no idea what an NFT was at the end of 2020, myself included. CEO Kayvon Tehranian and the founding team at Foundation patiently explained it to me and invited me to be one of their featured artists when they launched their marketplace in January of 2021. I did some research and decided to give it a shot.
NFTs are an understandably misunderstood and divisive topic. The vast majority of you who are subscribed to this blog have known about me and my work for years before NFTs were a commonplace thing. I imagine many of you hold very strong beliefs about them, one way or another. As for me, I have found my niche in the wild west that is NFT art. The majority of the work I release now is on the eco-friendly Tezos blockchain. I have an unparalleled creative community I never imagined possible. I love the work I am doing and I love the opportunities I have and even more so the opportunities I can now give to others as a professional curator and collector. There’s a lot to say but for now I’ll just share that I am happy I made the decision to get involved, especially as early as I did. I feel very, very lucky.
Things really turned a corner in my life once I began to see value in all of my work. It felt like a domino effect of positivity. Racer Trash was getting bigger and bigger and my involvement began to dwindle as it took on a life of its own. I settled into creating art for art’s sake, and people liked it. The success of my art attracted interesting work to me. I got really busy come 2021. By that summer I knew I wanted to celebrate the digital artists who were now finally getting some of the recognition they deserved. So I curated and produced one of the first in person NFT art shows and live auctions in LA, Electric Psychedelia, along with Bright Moments DAO.
“Electric Psychedelia” was a big success, and many of the artists I curated are now quite successful and well known. I was really happy with how it went and I loved the experience of curating and bringing people together. I wanted to take the show on a mini tour through my hometown of Chicago followed by NYC, but then came the variants and surges which kept in person events safely out of the picture for the rest of the year pretty much.
A year and a half later, I found myself back in Hawaii. This time I was there celebrating my anniversary with my partner. We fell in love while working together in Racer Trash, not getting the chance to hang out in person for months but slowly getting to know each other and realizing there was a big connection there. He is one of the things I am most grateful for out of all the amazing things to be grateful for from my time in Racer Trash.
So much had changed since I was last in Hawaii mere weeks before quarantine began. Nearly every aspect of my life was different now. It put me in a very introspective state, and an extremely grateful one. It was also my first time visiting Maui and I thought it was very lovely. I still dream about living in Hawaii someday.
While in Hawaii I released my first art series to incorporate AI technology, Frogeforms. The creative process behind this series was pretty crazy, I ended up being invited to do a whole presentation on it months later in LA and also documented it here.
My art from this series went on to be displayed in public art installations in London and NYC earlier this year, as well as a groundbreaking auction with Artsy. Merging my love for analog hardware with AI was a whole new avenue I am still excitedly exploring. It also led to the biggest opportunity I’ve had so far as an artist, a project that would take me across the globe to headline at a former power plant in east Berlin.
After the success of Frogeforms I started working on an even more ambitious project incorporating the same recursive techniques I’d created my froges with. I wanted to explore generative processes, so I reached out to the incredible generative artist Aaron Penne who connected me with developer Stevan Dedovic. Stevan and I had several calls to discuss how to create a new series, “Reverse Zoology” where many of the steps I took with frogeforms could be done with code. Stevan wrote his own blog posts about the amazing work he did on our project.
I knew that I wanted the release of “Reverse Zoology” to be an in person event. I was inspired by Bright Moments' history of live minting; where collectors mint artwork on site in an immersive experiential event. It felt like an important new way to collect, appreciate and create art. I loved the idea of people, myself included, not knowing what they would get. It’s kind of like putting a quarter into a toy machine. It’s a delightful (and addictive) experience. We had our work cut out for us, agreeing to a tentative launch date sometime in the spring of 2022.
The start of this year brought 2 more exciting art opportunities to my door - my first commissioned art installations. Technically the process had started at least a year or so ago, but they finally were created and installed this year. You can find my art prominently displayed at the Tommie Hotel in LA as well the Tommie in Austin, Texas. I was over the moon watching my work get put up at the location here in Hollywood. They created a beautiful metallic wallpaper out of my artwork. The end result is stunning, you can find it at the main lobby elevators.
My installation at Tommie ATX is a photo I created turned into a giant light box. It hangs over the lobby coffee bar and I haven’t seen it in person yet but I hope to soon. And I’m actively manifesting more installations in the future 🔮
In January I found myself in Germany for the first time, helping the Bright Moments team with their next big opening, NFT Art Berlin. I visited our iconic event venue, Kraftwerk and got a feel for the city and the people there.
I ended up working as a curator and artist relations for the 30+ artists featured in our exhibition. I was also invited to be one of the 10 artists premiering a new series there. The timing magically aligned with the same internal deadline Stevan and I were working towards for “Reverse Zoology”, and so the stars aligned for me to have the exact kind of premiere I wanted.
While I was planning NFT Art Berlin, I was simultaneously working on curating my next show here in LA for February, "Tomorrow, Today".
I curated local artists who I believe represent the cutting edge and future of NFT art. This was actually my intent with “Electric Psychedelia” the year prior, but at that time there were so few local NFT artists that I had to expand the curation outside of LA. This time I had so many artists on my list that I really struggled to cull it down to the 21 artists I ended up curating.
In the days leading up to the show, I got increasingly excited but nervous communications from the venue about exceeding capacity as our RSVPs started pouring in. The show was a big hit and exactly what I wanted to achieve in our community. I’m already starting preliminary work on my next show, a second installation of “Electric Psychedelia”, which I hope to make a yearly event featuring new artists each year.
I got to live in Berlin for the month of April for my work with NFT Art Berlin. It was such an incredible experience, and a whole lot of work. We had an 80,000+ sq ft venue on our hands, and the pressure of being the first event of its kind.
"Reverse Zoology" was premiering the last Friday of the festival, which was enormously exciting and nerve wracking for me as we were expecting our biggest turnout yet. I performed my first live analog glitch + live coded visuals set with the talented producer and artist Konx Om Pax who patiently worked back and forth with me to craft the perfect set. The night ended with an epic closing set by one of my favorite DJs, LSDXOXO.
We had a lot of fun making a little teaser for the show which I've shared below.
I also met Stevan, my developer partner on “Reverse Zoology” for the first time in person in Berlin. He just happened to already be in Europe so the timing once again worked out perfectly.
Berlin was a truly incredible experience, one I still pinch myself over. At the end of it all, I curated over 150 works of art seen by 10,000+ attendees, and released my largest series yet while doing my first live visuals performance at a renowned cultural institution in Berlin. My work graced the same giant screen that we used to premiere Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s genesis NFT from “Einstein on The Beach” each night. It’s hard to convey how deeply grateful I am for all of this. And we got some great press, to boot.
So here we are, a couple weeks later and I am back in Joshua Tree on a much needed retreat. I booked a house here earlier this year when I recognized that my professional/art life was ramping up in a big way. I knew I would need a break. I was very right. There was a ton of momentum leading up to and after my work in Berlin. The day before I left the country, I was featured on a panel at the main stage of the LA Convention Center for NFT LA. It was hands down the biggest event that I have ever spoken at.
My artwork is prominently featured on a billboard in LA’s trendy Silverlake neighborhood this month and I’m getting sweet texts from people passing by, excited to know the artist who made it. Earlier this year my portrait was also on a billboard in LA, big year for billboards for me it seems. Just before I left for this trip to Joshua Tree I got an email letting me know my work was featured in Fortune. I’m on a no email, no social media retreat here so who knows what’s waiting in my inbox for me next week but I’m actually excited about it...
It’s been almost exactly 2 years since I last wrote here. My life now seems permanently simpler since before covid, and many aspects of my life remain primarily online. A lot of people I know moved away. I more or less always work from home now. I live by the beach for the time being. And I spend a lot of time everyday just being thankful for what I have, what I’ve achieved and overcome. I am so happy to be here today.
© 2026 Ellie Pritts
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)