Who is Ellen Archer?

Spending vacations in Indiana, my siblings and cousins and I put on musical funeral plays in the reception room of the family Funeral Home — wailing and preaching as the mourners and ministers —before our parents found out and restricted us to performances of historical dramas in the living room upstairs.

My dad was the son of a Methodist minister and my mother was the daughter of a Funeral Director. A match made in heaven. My parents were gifted athletes who also had a deep appreciation of the arts, laughter and social justice. Our family sang grace in 4 part harmony before every meal, my brother cast me and our dog, Nipper, in his 8mm movies with the neighborhood kids and my sister and I took piano with Miss Murikami. My sister actually enjoyed practicing (which got her out of doing chores) and became a concert pianist.

I loved being on stage and performing and got a degree in voice/opera from the Boston Conservatory. After three years as a Music Tutor at Harvard and performing in Boston’s theatre and music scene, I made my way to New York with my physicist boyfriend who was offered a post at Columbia.

My first years in NYC were spent as an actor working onstage and in both VO and on camera commercials which allowed me to ditch the temp job (which I wasn’t any good at anyway). Audiobooks found me 20 years ago. My first book was 17 hours long with nearly 25 characters. It felt like I finally had my one woman show. I was hooked. Singing and acting and narrating were all woven together in my professional life.

I brought my lived experience and deep emotional life as well as a strong ear to my work — whether it's narrating a book about Women Who Love Too Much (which Pamela Anderson is listening to while in the bathtub in her son’s documentary about her - and by the way, same girl), or live announcing the CMT Country Music Awards on CBS, narrating a James Patterson novel or a Fantasy series with dozens of characters with dozens of accents, or going “Full Debra” in animation and videos games (if you know, you know, lol) I am confident in my ability to inhabit the work and do it justice.

I split up with the physicist, married someone else, cared for my parents through their illnesses and deaths, grieved the death of my beloved brother, won a few awards, gave birth to an amazing son and managed to create not only a successful career but to also add to my family, a wonderful family of friends. My passion for nature and animals is as great as my passion for the arts. New York can be a challenging place for a nature lover, but my son and I (as well as rescue dogs Sunny and Clementine) share a house with a garden that gives me an opportunity to pretend I'm in the great outdoors.