Kelly Chen is a writer, researcher, and memory worker based in Boston. Her poetry and games employ noise and presentation technologies to perform digital relations. She choreographs hypertexts that perform against obvious or encouraged uses of everyday objects and programs to engage with the transmundane.

She studied Media Arts and Data Science at Northeastern University, and her student research included experimental archival projects for digital and physical collections. Her archival projects build memory practices and infrastructures through scrapbooking, oral history, time capsules, and personal hosting. She was a Teaching Fellow with the Processing Foundation in 2023, teacher for the School for Poetic Computation in Spring 2025, and lead artist for the Museum of Fine Arts Community Art Initiative Artist Project 2025-26.

Her current interests are in memory, digital intimacy, surrealism, and telecommunications.

security culture/privacy
psychogeographies
jello
criminal intimacies
alice becker ho
autonomous action
hyperlink blue
tabletop role-play games

- reading "the university, too, must be destroyed" zine, plain words: italian american anarchists 1914-20

- tattooing (taking new bookings in philly, worcester, and ny ;p email me)

- scheming piracy/critical technology study group with olivia

- curating visual media and performance @ firehouse, worcester

- riding my bike really fast in philly

- writing a horror story with ben at the sil

Queer Sonic Aesthetics: Resistance and Memoriam in Pauline Oliveros’ Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS (2022)

Queer Citizenship, Surveillance, and Potential Criminality: Marginalized Bodies in the NYPD Surveillance Film Archives (2021)

Selected Exhibitions [Click to read more.]:

Selected Residencies/Fellowships
[Click to read more.]

Selected Public Programs [Click to read more.]:

Things that i have been thinking about:

Selected Research Writing:

Currently:

Selected Works [Click to learn more.]

Museum of Fine Arts, Lead Artist, Community Art Initiative Artist Project 2025-26