Jordan Zayas Kelly

JORDAN ZAYAS KELLY is an interdisciplinary artist working between New York and London. Known for her experimental practice that encompasses video, sculpture, sound installation, and prose, she interrogates relationships to identity and the conditions of being human while critiquing hegemonic representational systems. Her work explores moments where objects, time, and space intersect through haptic engagements with archive and memory. Her manipulation of materials becomes a practice of harnessing histories that resist traditional documentation, particularly focusing on architectures and infrastructures that have redacted vital narratives in the building of institutional foundations. In her current work, she employs historically exploited materials—sugar, denim, raw cotton, steel, and cocoa butter—transforming these elements into aesthetic interventions that question their extractive lineages. Kelly earned her B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Visual Art from Columbia University, New York, (2022) and recently completed her M.A. in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (2025). She is a recent recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Award by the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Her work has been featured in group exhibitions internationally in Los Angeles, London, and New York, including London Fashion Week as well as in publications such as Vogue, Office Magazine, Flash Art and more. With a background investigating power structures within archives, Kelly works to reframe and honour traditions that supplement and credit communities often rendered ahistorical. Her practice attunes audiences to quotidian practices of refusal and seeks to safeguard narratives that resist conventional modes of representation, recalling the personal with the understanding that what is personal is inherently political.