Ellen Dissanayake

Who is Ellen Dissanayake?

Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar whose work focuses on the anthropological exploration of art and culture. She is credited for re-defining art as 'making special'; that is, art making involves taking something out of its everyday use and context and making it somehow special.

As she states in her preface to 1995's Homo Aestheticus:

At first glance, the fact that the arts and related aesthetic attitudes vary so widely from one society to another would seem to suggest that they are wholly learned or "cultural" in origin rather than, as I will show, also biological or "natural". One can make an analogy with language: learning to speak is a universal, innate predisposition for all children even though individual children learn the particular language of the people among whom they are nurtured. Similarly, art can be regarded as a natural, general proclivity that manifests itself in culturally learned specifics such as dances, songs, performances, visual display, and poetic speech.

Dissanayake's birth name was Ellen Franzen; she was born in Illinois and raised in Walla Walla, Washington, where her father was an engineer and her mother a homemaker.