Ellen Gallagher is an American artist born in 1965 who lives and works in New York and in Rotterdam, Holland.

She is an abstract painter and multimedia artist who creates minimalist work with subject narratives. Gallagher has a bi-racial ethnicity, and racial themes are often evident in her work, along with marine biology and popular culture. She makes innovative use of materials, sometimes carving images into thick sheets of watercolor paper and drawing with ink, watercolor, and pencil.

Episode #198: Ellen Gallagher discusses the paper cutouts that she's embedded into paintings throughout her career. Shown at the New Museum, seated in her solo exhibition "Don't Axe Me" (2013), she explains how she scrapped away areas of her thickly painted canvases and inlaid black paper birds, leaving their sharply cut edges distinctly visible.