Kelly Sinclair (she/they) is a place-based artist, writer, and wilderness rites of passage guide.
Nourished by practices of walking, deep listening, pigment foraging, dreamwork, land-based storytelling, and mirroring, Kelly’s work opens conversations with inner and outer landscapes. Drawn to places’ underworlds and fascinated by hidden layers of geology and land use, Kelly will devote her residency time to exploring PLAYA’s intersecting terrains as inspiration for a new project she is working on in collaboration with her geology-nerd best friend.
Kelly creates art in the Sonoran Desert, homelands of the Tohono Oʼodham and Pascua Yaqui peoples, and the Bay Area, home to the Muwekma Ohlone + Bay Miwok tribes. She leads seasonal rites of passage ceremonies within Nisenan homelands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. As someone who is nourished daily by conversations with living landscapes, Kelly is a student of complexity and radical repair and celebrates indigenous resurgence and land rematriation as our collective way forward.
Kelly received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Nevada and is currently pursuing a graduate certificate in Ecopsychology. She has shared her work at Burning Man, SFMOMA, California Academy of Sciences, Joshua Tree Music Festival, Bay Area art parties, and in galleries in California and Hawaii.
Learn more at www.kelly-sinclair.com