John Ellis (born 23 May 1952)[citation needed] is a British former TV producer and professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In 1982 he joined Simon Hartog and Keith Griffiths to form Large Door, the company that bid successfully to make Visions, a magazine series on world cinema for Channel 4 when it opened in 1982.

He was also co-founded 'Spectre' a collective of filmmakers that included Simon Hartog, Anna Ambrose, Michael Whyte, Vera Neubauer, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, Phil Mulloy and Keith Griffiths.

In 1982, he developed a medium theory approach, proposing that television's typical regime of spectatorship is that of the 'glance' rather than the more cinematic one of the 'gaze', and exploring the segmented and repetitive structure of TV programming.

His work on television history includes several articles on Channel 4; on critical issues including the construction of a canon of TV work; the importance of overlooked items such as interstitials; and decade-long involvement in the EU funded archival projects Videoactive and EUScreen In 2013 he won a European Research Council grant of €1,600,000 for ADAPT a five-year study of the history of technology in TV broadcasting, concentrating particularly on the standard forms of production (both on film and on video) and the ways that these 'technological arrays' were adopted and brought into regular use.