Kelly Dawn Noel is an interdisciplinary artist, creative, and recently-filmmaker, whose work lives in the uneasy space between survival and surrender.

Born and raised in San Diego, her creative practice has evolved across mediums including sculpture, mixed media, installation, film, writing, and graphic work. Her pieces often incorporate unconventional materials—mirrors, bones, ink, resin, found objects, and fragments of language—assembled into intimate visual confrontations with grief, trauma, identity, and transformation.

At the center of Kelly’s work is a radical commitment to honesty.

Kelly’s exhibitions, including Never Dead Forever and With Love, Please Die, invite audiences into deeply personal environments where vulnerability becomes a shared language rather than a private burden.

Her short film Staying continues this exploration through cinematic storytelling, offering an unflinching yet compassionate reflection on surviving suicide and learning how to remain alive inside one’s own life.