Ellie Pyle is a freelance playwright, novelist, actress, director, host, and versatile producer who has worked in creative development for a variety of media including theatre, comics, TV, games, and podcasts.
She has edited over 500 issues of comics for Marvel and DC (Vertigo). At Riot Games she facilitated IP management and story strategy, in addition to editing scripts and story content. She returned to Marvel Television as a Director of Creative Development and later Executive Director of Digital Media for Marvel Publishing. During that time she worked on products across Marvel's portfolio including Netflix, Hulu and Freeform shows, theatre for young audiences, digital media, and animation. Most recently, she developed narrative podcasts, edited print and digital comics (including the launch of SPIDER-BOY), and co-hosted the Ambie nominated podcast Women of Marvel.
Her expertise in collaborative media is invaluable to shared universes. She has worked strategically with new worlds and established IP. Her specialty is evolving beloved characters through stories and across platforms, while still keeping their cores resonant and recognizable for a passionate fanbase.
As a writer, she loves a challenge and a deadline. She once wrote the book for a jukebox musical in just a month. Her play Sources (about an AI that can remove anonymity from the internet) had to be rewritten to take place on the night of the 2016 election in the three days between the election and the first industry reading. Plays include: Graves, Whiterock Cliff (musical and solo show), Heretics, Sources, Beginnings (jukebox musical), Play within a Play, In Birnam Wood, Dinosaur Soup, BattleArt III: The Art of Battle (The Quest for Battle), Trapped in a Suburban Parking Lot, Ghosts on the Water, Offing The Dog, Angel, and Preferred Method of Suicide. Her one woman show, Blood Brides, has been published internationally, and her two novels, Southern Girls with Big Vocabularies and The Men In Between, are available on Amazon. Whiterock Cliff, a one man musical she co-wrote with Ryan McCurdy, opened Off-Broadway in March of 2021. Several of her plays are currently available on New Play Exchange.
She began writing plays in high school as a four time winner of the young playwrights residency New Voices for the Theater and founded her first theatre company, The Risk Players, at the age of 19 in Richmond, VA. She continued to write and independently produce while getting a B.S. (seriously) in Playwriting and Screenwriting at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and an MFA in Performing Arts at Savannah College of Art and Design.
As Executive Artistic Director of Bespoke Plays, which she co-founded with Christine Boylan in 2018, Ellie produces staged readings of new plays in Los Angeles, New York, and London customized to the goals of the writer and readiness of the play. Bespoke Plays is a writer driven international pipeline for playwright/TV writer development and exchange specializing in genre plays with diverse casts. Like many of Bespoke's playwrights, Ellie is a multihyphante, writing, producing, directing and acting as needed (though never all at once). When lockdown began, she transformed Bespoke into the weekly writers group Sequestered Sundays, which elevated the form of Zoom readings and discussion through weekly readings of over 60 plays, pilots, and screenplays from March 2020 - May 2021.
A former Performing Arts Coordinator for the City of Savannah, she served on the board of Savannah Repertory Theatre from 2020-2021. Savannah remains one of her greatest muses, so it is a privilege to be able to give back to the city that has inspired her since her grad school days as a ghost tour guide. She can tell you more than you actually want to know about a variety of occult traditions and practices.