Ell Potter

BA English Language and Literature 2014
Actor and Writer

Ell Potter is an actor, writer, and award-winning narrator. Best known as co-founder of critically acclaimed theatre collective Hotter Project, Ell’s work is outrageous, irreverent, and unashamedly queer.

Ell began interviewing people for her verbatim theatre projects in a Keble basement in 2017. She has since featured the experiences of over 100 men, women, and non-binary people in her genre-bending, iconoclastic shows HOTTER and FITTER. Both productions secured a cult-hit following and sold out multiple runs at Soho Theatre, before a Guardian feature billing them ‘hilarious, sincere, sexy and brutal’ catapulted the project into the mainstream.

Ell has since taken Hotter Project into classrooms, leading workshops on sex education and personal expression through theatre; she also discusses these topics on radio and podcasts, including BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Continuing her fixation with all things sex-related, Ell’s latest work is the British Podcast Award-nominated series Life of Bi: a slippery history of bisexuality.

Audio has become central to Ell’s career. While completing her postgraduate degree in Acting at LAMDA, Ell was named Audible’s ‘Breakout Star’, and her debut audiobook performance received an Audie nomination. She is now internationally recognised for her work with major publishers including Penguin, Harper Collins, and Macmillan. She is a four-time Audiofile Earphones Award-winner, and her narration of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell was named a Washington Post Best Audiobook of the Year 2020.

Ell’s short film Minutes, which she co-wrote and starred in, opened at BFI Flare 2022, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ film festival. Minutes recently enjoyed its North American premiere at LA’s Outfest Film Festival.

At Keble, Ell was a choral scholar and spent most of her time doing theatre and ‘not studying’ English. Miraculously, she graduated with first class honours, and in her second year was the recipient of the Nigel Smith Memorial Prize.