Kelly Taylor Mitchell (she/her, b. 1994) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Atlanta, GA where she is currently a 2023-2024 Midtown Alliance Artist-in-Residence, a 2023-2024 Arts & Social Justice Fellow at Emory University, a 2023-2024 BIPOC Lyndon House Arts Foundation Fellow, and an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. Kelly’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory, real and imagined, woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora. Her work is deeply invested in labor intensive making, slowness, and home-spun passed down processes. Working across printmaking, papermaking, performance, book arts, and textiles, her current work stems from ancestral origin points in the American South and Caribbean. Kelly’s practice references and constructs mythologies that find their roots in marronage, Sankofa, masquerade, and protective gestures of the Diaspora. Kelly is the 2024 Inaugural Nellie Mae Rowe Prize Seed Awardee, a 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awardee, a 2021-2022 SMFA at Tufts Travelling Fellow, the 2022 Inaugural Spelman College Affiliate Fellow at The American Academy in Rome and a 2020-2021 Working Artist Project Fellow at The Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. She has completed residencies with The University of Texas at Austin, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Atlanta Contemporary. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, Penland School of Craft and Dieu Donne. Her work can be found in collections such as the Harvard Fine Arts Library, Duke University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Walker Art Center Library, and publications like Burnaway, Art Papers, and Hand Papermaking.

Contact: kellytaylormitchell@gmail.com