Independent recording artist, Ellise Gitas (born September 10, 1998), is a dynamic singer and songwriter born and raised in San Francisco, California. She quickly gained attention on social media in 2016, after posting videos of herself singing covers of well known hits on Instagram, beginning with "Hello" by Adele and released her first single, "Dominoes", on July 7, 2016. She released her debut single, “Love Made Me Do It,” in February of 2018, and since then, has garnered over 4 million streams across her Spotify as a completely independent artist. Fans naturally gravitated to Ellise’s power house vocals and goofy personality. Her passion is writing and singing music that tells stories about the ugly, unpolished side of love. Through dark, twisted lyrics, hard hitting bass lines and out of the ordinary melodies, Ellise is putting a grunge twist on pop music.

At the young age of 17, Ellise graduated from high school two years early and moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of becoming a professional singer and recording artist. The process, however, was not an easy one. In order to graduate at the end of her sophomore year, Ellise was required to double up on classes for two years, and complete a lengthy exam which determined whether she would be able to continue on with her dream, or spend another year in high school before being able to graduate. Once she got the positive test results back over the summer, she was beyond excited to start her transition to Los Angeles.

Once in LA, Ellise decided to start posting covers on her YouTube channel in order to utilize her voice and have it out in the open for people to hear. Her first cover, “Hello” by Adele, gained immediate attention, as did her weekly covers following which included covers of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself”, Zayn Malik’s “Pillow Talk”, Adele’s “Hello” and more. Her Youtube channel quickly began to grow, bringing her fans who loved her purely for her voice. Since creating her YouTube channel in November, she has quickly reached over 9,000 subscribers, and is grateful for each and every one.

Since moving in October, Ellise has been solely focused on one thing: music. She began the year writing with Grammy Award Winning Producer, Chris Seefried (Lana Del Rey, Andra Day and Fitz & the Tantrums) for Uproxx & Honda Stage’s “Uncharted”. The duo wrote and produced her first original single, “Breakdown”, which can be seen on the Uproxx website as well as sites such as Complex.com, Honda’s Facebook page and more. She’s spent the last 6 months in the studio recording her upcoming EP release and will release her first single of the album titled “Dominoes” in June 2016.

Currently, the budding artist is in the Top 25 of the Macy’s iHeart Radio Rising Star competition, which would allow her to open the 2016 iHeart Radio Music Festival in Las Vegas if won. She can be seen at Coney Island’s Summer Concert Series this July at Luna Park and will perform at the Supergirl Surf Pro later that same month.

A thriving newbie to the big city of Los Angeles, Ellise has many milestones and dreams she cannot wait to start accomplishing. “If I can evoke emotion from even one person while listening to my music, then that’s really all that matters,” she says. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.