Kelly Bond is a New Orleans-based somatic practitioner of experimental dance, choreography, directing, yoga, pedagogy, and parenting. She is an adjunct assistant professor of dance at Tulane where she earned an MFA in interdisciplinary dance performance. She also holds an MA in European dance-theatre practice from Laban in London. Alongside collaborator Ellery Burton, Kelly uses experimental performance to explore attention, intimacy, presence, and the ways bodies make meaning together in real time. A more recent branch of her practice extends these questions into environmental contexts, asking how somatic awareness might cultivate deeper relationships with the living world.

In 2024-25, she developed and facilitated a pedagogical practice called Embodying Ecology as a Senior Researcher with the Tulane Interdisciplinary Environmental Research & Action (TIERA) program at the Fundación para la Conservación de los Andes Tropicales (FCAT) in Ecuador. While in residence at A Studio in the Woods, Kelly intends to deepen her work on Embodying Ecology as both a lived practice and a shareable approach to ecological learning, clarifying how somatic practice can support ecological awareness, relational thinking, and collective care. Embodying Ecology can help us encounter ecosystems not as distant subjects of study, but as living relationships of which we are a part. 

Photo credit: Kelly Bond