ELPENTHE (Elliott Beenk) is a Los Angeles-based artist, producer, composer, and scientist whose work uses music as a connective medium across art, technology, brands, and culture. While building his career in music, he has moonlighted as a scientist and environmental activist, earning a Master’s in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering focused on sustainable energy.

That interplay between disciplines has shaped ELPENTHE into an artist project that moves naturally across major cultural stages, collaborations, film, and emerging creative platforms, including performances at Coachella and the closing night of AI on the Lot at Amazon MGM Studios. Alongside his work as an artist, EL has collaborated with James Blake, Mustard, Steve Lacy, Angela Aguilar, Monica Martin, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Janelle Monáe, and others, including composing the soundtrack for Jidenna’s short film KITA, which premiered at Tribeca. Increasingly, the work has expanded beyond songs into complete creative worlds: A Night at Katie’s, a concept album commissioned for a national Target campaign and pressed to vinyl through Good Neighbor Records, and a Suno-backed FWB Fest mixtape that will be released on cassette.

EL has also advised agencies on sonic branding strategy, using music as a way to shape identity, memory, atmosphere, and shared experience. Across records, performances, campaigns, and emerging technology, his practice is defined by an ability to connect disciplines, collaborators, and ideas into experiences that feel larger than any one medium.

That instinct for connecting systems predates his career in music. As an environmental engineer, EL studied phytoremediation with Jerry Schnoor and, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolded, began field and laboratory research on oil toxicity and phytoremediation in Gulf Coast marsh ecosystems. Encouraging early results helped catalyze a broader multi-year University of Iowa research effort spanning multiple crude oils, exposure levels, and ecological variables, becoming one of the more comprehensive plant-focused studies of oil phytoremediation of its kind at the time.

His environmental work also included helping build early partnerships around Miscanthus x giganteus biomass projects supporting the University of Iowa’s renewable-energy goals. A Department of Energy America’s Next Eco-Star national finalist and SROP McNair Scholar, Beenk carried that work beyond academia through two solar-powered bicycle tours across Iowa, sustainability programs for music festivals, renewable-energy advising, and service on the inaugural board of YEA’s Hollywood Climate Summit.

Rather than treating science, art, and advocacy as separate pursuits, Beenk’s work is built around the places where they overlap—using music, technology, and systems thinking to shape how people experience ideas and imagine what comes next.

The name ELPENTHE comes from the ancient Greek nepenthe—a mythical potion said to chase away sorrow.