Ellen Rovner

Ellen is the founder and director of the Chelsea Gateway Project, an ensemble of community-based initiatives celebrating Chelsea’s rich immigrant history and building on the city’s enormous potential as a showplace for the American immigrant experience. As part of this ongoing project, Ellen initiated and conducts Chelsea Jewish Tours, a series of walking day trips recognizing and reflecting on Chelsea’s extensive Jewish immigrant history and its legacy for a community that has recently become home to Hispanic, African, and Asian immigrants. In addition, for Chelsea Prospers, the city’s neighborhood vitality initiative, Ellen has fostered cross-cultural connections by developing online neighborhood, food, and storytelling excursions. Ellen is the executive producer, writer, and narrator of Chelsea, the Jewish Years, a documentary film featuring oral histories from Chelsea’s twentieth-century Jewish community.

Ellen has taught food anthropology and ethnography courses as a visiting professor in Boston University’s Liberal Arts and Gastronomy master’s program. In addition, as a visiting scholar in Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, Ellen researched women’s food voices as vehicles for social action; published online essays and commentaries concerning food, families, class, and ethnicity; developed a dissertation-based research manuscript; and mentored Brandeis University undergraduates through the school’s Student Scholar Program. Ellen has also taught courses in cultural anthropology, food and culture, power and violence, gender studies, and religion as a Brandeis University teaching fellow and university instructor.

Ellen has organized, designed, coordinated, and consulted on social action and community development programs and museum-style exhibits for Temple Emmanuel of Chelsea, the Chelsea Collaborative, Chelsea Prospers, Chelsea Greenroots, Chelsea Community Connections, Healthy Chelsea, Florence, Cohen, and Irwin Chafetz Assisted Living, Brookline Community Mental Health Center, Newton’s Paula Brody and Family Water-Immersion Education Center, Jewish Historical Society of the North Shore, and Temple Israel of Boston.

Ellen has published articles and essays on food, gender, conflict, and culture for the Visions Magazine, Jewish Journal, Huffington Post, Brandeis Initiative on Aging, and Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium. She also wrote a monthly Boston Herald food and lifestyles column. In addition, Ellen has lectured on food, families, class, and culture at numerous North Shore and Greater Boston Jewish institutions and professional anthropological societies in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and the U.K.