Kelsey’s personal work explores themes about human perception, our evolving understanding of the verisimilitude and function of the photographic medium, and our mediated relationship to the landscape. Her work has been shown at venues including Vox Populi, the Berman Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Delaware Art Museum, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Delaware Contemporary, EXPO Chicago, the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at The University of the Arts, among others. Kelsey has lectured extensively on her own work and contemporary art history nationally and abroad. She has taught has been a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and Interlochen Arts Academy, as well as a visiting lecturer and critic at a range of colleges and universities. Her current research projects have explored the aesthetics and rhetoric of fascism, the intersection of art and technology, activist artists, and experimental performance theory. 

Prior to SPACE, Kelsey worked in curatorial and advancement capacities for the Michener Art Museum, Vox Populi Gallery, Locks Gallery, independent curator Marianne Bernstein, and her own independent multi-site curatorial projects; as well as gaining significant administrative experience at Blind Spot Magazine, the Penn Museum, and WPRB 103.3FM/Princeton Broadcasting Service. Kelsey proudly worked retail and photo lab jobs for a decade.

An alumna of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University, Kelsey received her interdisciplinary MFA at the University of Pennsylvania with a certificate in Landscape Architecture and holds her bachelor's degree in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University with a certificate in European Cultural Studies. Prior to the pandemic, she also attended the Executive Program in Arts and Cultural Strategy offered by the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice and National Arts Strategies. She was previously a longtime member of the collective Vox Populi (in addition to her employment there). In 2016, she was awarded a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Exhibitions and Public Interpretation grant for her project and publication Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology (1968-1985). She has retired her long-running and celebrated art blog/Tumblr Softpyramid(s), which at it’s peak had over 325k followers.

Her writing has appeared in Performa’s now defunct Performa Magazine, Title Magazine, and Studio (from the Studio Museum in Harlem) among others. Additionally, she has written catalog essays for publications featuring the work of Thomas Chimes, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, the contemporary legacy of Charles Sheeler, and contemporary explorations of photographic objecthood. Some thoughts by Kelsey on the future of the art field can be found in the Common Field “Field Perspectives” with Title Magazine.

This website has not been updated in a few years and is not a complete archive. If you are in need of more information about a body of work, recent work, or are looking for projects or writing that does not appear on this site– please contact kelseyhalliday(at)gmail(dot)com.