Although born in Maryborough, Ian E.C. Brown spent much of his childhood in Townsville. After attending Heatley Sate High School, where he developed an interest in drama, Brown went on to complete an Associate diploma in Performing Arts at James Cook University. During that time he also participated in a number of local productions, notably with companies at the Cowshed and Civic Theatre. After spending some time in Brisbane and then Tasmania he finally settled in the Queensland capital in the mid 1990s, undertaking theatre studies at the Queensland University of Technology. Although he earned first class honours, and began a Ph D at the university, Brown became disenchanted with both the academic process and the industry's non-support of new work. It was around the same period that he made his decision to only perform in new theatre works. To this end he became very much involved with Playlab, the Queensland-based organisation devoted to the creation of new works for the stage, and supported by writers, directors, actors and producers.
Within a few years of first becoming involved with Playlab Brown took on the role of President/Executive Director, and around the same period began presenting some of his own works, three of which formed the trilogy Three For The City, first performed together in 1999. The trilogy of self-contained one hour monologues is based loosely on a blend of autobiographical and fictional persona and set in and around the Brisbane inner-city suburb of Fortitude Valley (aka the Valley). Brown describes the trilogy as the story of Antoine Rarely, a persona he developed some years ago as a means of communicating the hysteria of the singular perspective as it entangles with love, enmeshment, dependence, loss and grief. In December 2002 his monologue The Valley Member, also inspired by Fortitude Valley, was staged by the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
