bio

Kelly Ardens is a multidisciplinary artist and performer from Sardinia who identifies as queer and neurodivergent.

She is currently working as a theatre performer on her two solo shows.

Her first show, The Margin, in 2024, won the SIAE’s “Per chi crea” competition as part of the PRESENT! programme within the FAR OUT Live Arts Festival 2024 at BASE Milano. Following the preview, several residencies and rehearsals with Fuorimargine – Sardinia’s Centre for Dance and Performing Arts Production – the work made its debut at the Fuorimargine 2025 festival. The performance tells her autobiographical story as a neurodivergent person. In her daily life, Kelly identifies herself as neurodivergent with joy as a way of challenging the myths of suffering and pathology that surround neurodivergent people.

In 2026, she won the prestigious international Open Dialogo 3 competition and travelled to London as a guest of Chisenhale Dance Space. The first studio performance of her piece Stories from My Body Before the Apocalypse was staged on 14 June at CDS. The work explores her body, which, by recounting stories from her own life, challenges aesthetic norms, the frenetic world of social media and stereotypes, whilst highlighting the beauty and importance of living in non-conforming bodies.

Her chaotic and multifaceted art finds expression across a variety of artistic fields, blending them together: she produces electronic songs over which she raps and sings, makes short films (one of which was a finalist at the 2024 Val Susa Film Fest), creates self-portraits using digital collage (for which she won a scholarship for advanced photography training), dances by taking belly dancing as a starting point and deconstructing it, does his own hand-poked tattoos, draws motivational doodles, has acted in a docuseries, has studied theatrical clowning, writes poetry, has contributed to published books, plays with alternative fashion by reusing second-hand clothes to create original outfits and accessories, and experiments with painting, ready-made installations and collage. She blends various artistic disciplines, and her starting point is to learn the technique and then turn it into something unique.

A graduate of the DAMS (Arts, Music and Performing Arts) in Bologna, she studied performance, theatre and dance with international artists such as Bush Hartshon, Sarah Blanc and Sivan Rubinstein, and Italian artists such as Silvia Calderoni, Silvia Gribaudi, Marco D’Agostin, Marta Ciappina, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Marta Bellu, Laura Lucioli and Chiara Bersani. She has taken part in performances by other artists, such as Valentina Medda’s “Cities by night” and, since 2023, Chiara Bersani’s “Deserters”. She has been a member of “Al.di.qua. Artists” since 2021, an association representing disabled artists and entertainment workers.

She is a qualified life coach and mindfulness facilitator. She is also known as a mystic, a witch and a tarot reades: she has been studying the Tarot for twenty years and uses it as a tool for listening, healing and community-building. From a young age, she has developed spiritual gifts of which she is proud and which permeate her art and her presence.

Beyond mental health, her main themes are: love as a divine concept, femininity as a playground, being a witch through transqueerfeminist care, unconventional sexuality beyond the stereotypical male gaze, and revolutionary self-love.