Biography

Bella Ellwood-Clayton was born in Melbourne; daughter of avant garde composer, musician and playwright Syd Clayton [for a description of Clayton’s work see here or, for a list of his plays see here]. At a young age, Bella and her mother moved to Vancouver, Canada. Here she spent most of her childhood and high school years. During this time Bella worked as a model at Carol Jackson Modeling Agency, taking part in fashion shows, television commercials, and magazine photoshoots.

Bella then moved to Montreal where she completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1999 from Concordia University, majoring in anthropology. Her honours thesis examined cross-cultural notions of beauty. She received first class honours and was the recipient of the Mark Doughty Scholarship.

Soon after, with a crew from National Geographic, Bella took to the jungle to undertake ethnographic research about body art, tattoo and social change in the Mentawai Islands of Indonesia. This documentary continues to air from a wide range of international locations.

In 2000 Bella was offered a full scholarship by the Australian government to do a PhD. She then conducted an ethnography in the central Philippines about young women’s sexual and reproductive health. As the Philippines is the texting (SMS) capital of the world, her research followed suit. Bella became regarded as an international mobile phone expert, speaking about the relationship between love and technology at conferences in Asia, Europe, America and Australia and publishing her work in a number of prestigious academic anthologies. She also taught undergraduate classes about mobile telephony at Hallym University, in Korea.

Throughout her postgraduate degree Bella was the recipient of numerous grants, scholarships and traveling bursaries. In 2004 she completed her thesis, ‘When the land breeze and sea breeze were married: Young women’s lived sexualities in Kalibo, the central Philippines’ (The Key Centre for Women’s Health in Society, WHO Collaborating Centre, The University of Melbourne).

After spending some time in Canada, editing her novel and working as an “extra” and body double for film and television, Bella returned to Australia to write a sex and relationship column for the newspaper mX - published in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In 2006, Dr. Bella accepted the role of Sextxt ambassador, a service that provides sexual health information to Australian youth. She regularly contributes to magazines Women’s Health, Cosmopolitan Pregnancy, FHM, and appears on radio, television and gives public talks. In 2007, Dr. Bella joined the literary agency Curtis Brown. At present, Bella is writing a book about women’s sexuality with publisher, Allen & Unwin. She also pens a weekly relationship column for the Sunday Life magazine, which appears in the Melbourne Age and Sydney Sun-Herald.