Jordan Zayas Kelly, US/UK

Jordan Zayas Kelly, raised in New York, is an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK.

Kelly’s practice spans sculpture, sound installation, and prose, exploring the intersections of identity, material history, and archival memory. Grounded in Afro-diasporic studies, she engages tactile encounters with archive and embodied experience as a method of reclaiming histories that resist traditional documentation. Using historically exploited materials—sugar, denim, raw cotton, and steel—she transforms the quotidian into aesthetic interventions that confront their extractive lineages and the architectures that have redacted vital narratives.

She earned her B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Visual Art from Columbia University in New York in 2022. She received her M.A. in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, UK in 2025.

She recently garnered the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors and just finished a residency at renowned artist Derrick Adams’ The Last Resort in Baltimore. 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, and Flash Art.

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, understanding that what is personal is inherently political.