Joan Marie Kelly is a visual artist and a social artist. As a senior lecturer at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore since 2005, Joan Kelly navigates complex interwoven community relations in South East Asia with her own status as foreigner, by engaging communities in art making. This is the basis of her social art practice. She reinvigorates concepts of figure painting and drawing by collaborating with ethnographic practices. She empowers communities by accessing and engaging with their creative processes, stimulating and inspiring communities to look beyond long established social structures. Consequently, transforming perspectives of the greater society. The multi-disciplinary environment of NTU nurtures diversity and interdisciplinary relationships. Building alliances and collaborations has become a blueprint for success and innovation, as an artist in a research focused university. She continues a long collaboration with linguists, to sustain oral languages and has developed research methods for building communications between developers and ethnic villages during the process of touristification in Thailand.

Kelly also uses a collaborative approach when engaging students. She coordinates and teaches in the only interdisciplinary major between the engineering school, (EEE) and the art school (ADM). The yearly intake began with 32 students twelve years ago. Now it is held at a steady 110 students. She teaches a collaborative course “The News Media Lab” with Jessica Tan at WKWSCI. This course is in collaboration Google Inc. The Google Sprint is used to solve for the problems the students identify after researching their news organization as a team. Google was so impressed with student work 2019 Google awarded 6 student, Joan Kelly and Jessica Tan trips to Athens at the Google Newsgiest. 2017 Kelly is the 2nd prize winner in the Glover Painting Prize, Australia. She was a participant in the 2019 Salon du Beaux Arts, Carrousel du Louvre Museum. Her recent book Invisible Personas 2019, publication includes 45 images of her paintings and four essays by scholars who have worked with Kelly closely. Her recent solo exhibitions were held in Blue Mountain Gallery New York City, Fez Morocco, Smith College USA, New Delhi India, Fez Morocco. Recent Biennale’s include, Beijing, Bangladesh, Izmir Turkey, Korea, and Casablanca and group exhibitions have extended her global reach to: Hangzhou, Xi’an, Ulaanbaatar, and Gwangju.