Ellen Macdonald (b. 1983, Stirling) lives and works in Edinburgh. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2007 and the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2014.

Working primarily from observation, her practice explores painting as both a means of representation and a record of its own making. She is interested in the relationships between objects, actions and images, and in the ways that painting mediates between them. Her works function simultaneously as images and documents: they depict the visible world while bearing witness to the actions that brought them into being.