ABOUT THE ARTIST
John Kelly (he/him) is a performance and visual artist. His performance works dramatize the lives of social outsiders and the cultural and political realities they navigate. His most recent dance theater work, Underneath the Skin, was based on the life of the 20th-century gay novelist and tattoo artist Samuel Steward. His visual art is based in self-portraiture, including drawing, painting, photography, and video. He recently completed his first graphic memoir: A Friend Gave Me a Book, a 360-page, hand-drawn epic. Early in 2025, he will be an artist in residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, where will work on Inversions, a new solo performance that explores the space between pedestrian movement and dance through an episodic narrative, in response to words by and about gay and queer men prior to the late 1960’s.