Kelly Richmond (she/her) is an artist-scholar, Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, and 1855 Professor of Arts and Climate Justice at Michigan State University. Kelly’s research brings illuminating insights from the intersections of feminism, queer ecology, and spectrality studies to bear on the practices of performance. Her book project Spectral Ecologies: Queer Hauntings at the Edge of Climate Crisis examines the prevalence of haunted theatricality, spectral representations and uncanny affects in turn-of-the-millennia queer, feminist, and Indigenous theatre on Turtle Island. She argues that in the milieu of climate crisis, haunting emerges as a queerly performative mechanism for communicating environmentalist themes while modelling ecological practices as alternatives to the all-too anthropo-centric and anthropo-scenic Western dramatic tradition.

Kelly’s artistic works manifest via a research-creation methodology, wherein the scholarly practices of the dramaturg (historiographic research, critical literary analysis, and performative analysis) serve to inspire experimental devising, direction, and design of a theatrical event. Her projects include The Ithaca Department of Arts and Futures (Ithaca 2023), Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments (Ithaca 2022), eTRASH lab: an Exploratory Experiment in Theatre/Transforming Research/Representing And System/Shifting Humanity/Healing (Ithaca 2020), In Fair Verona: A Lesbian Dystopic Burlesque (Montreal 2016) and Peter Pan (Montreal 2014).

Kelly has published on queer circus, new materialist performance, and environmental stewardship in theatre education. Her scholarship has been awarded the Marvin Carlson Award for Best Student Essay in Theatre or Performance (2019), and the Elizabeth D. Worman Graduate Student Prize (2022), and her innovative teaching recognized with the James F. Slevin Assignment Sequence Prize (2022) and FGSS First-Year Writing Seminar Award (2022). In 2024 Kelly was inducted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, in recognition of her commitment to community leadership and the cultivation of supportive environments for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in higher education.

Collaboration is at the heart of many of Kelly’s intellectual and artistic pursuits. Alongside her own dissertation project, she has also contributed to the research-creation projects of her colleagues, including Beth Milles's Tartuffe (2019), Caitlin Kane’s The Loneliness Project (2018) and Civic Ensemble's Climates of Change (2017). In 2019, she co-organized a multi-day symposium titled Feminist Directions: Performance, Power, and Leadership which hosted some of the leading feminist theatre-makers on Turtle Island, including Tisa Chang, Leigh Fondakowski, Holly Hughes, Rhodessa Jones, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. She is currently involved with CATR’s Environmental Stewardship working group and ASTR’s Monsters: The Unquiet Dead and Climate Futurity Through a Queer and Indigenous Lens working groups.

​When she is not reading, writing, teaching, directing, or spectating, Kelly devotes her time to embodied practices of yoga, hiking, camping, circus, crossfit, knitting, and vegetarian cooking. She also volunteers in animal rescue, as a foster mom for neonatal kittens.