Audrey Kelley

Audrey Kelley is a versatile composer, music educator, and arts leader whose music spans a diverse range of mediums including orchestral, chamber, film, musical theatre, and electroacoustic music.

 

She is the 2025 Guest Composer-in-Residence of the Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra, and her orchestral work Speakeasy will be performed at the Smith Center in Las Vegas, Nevada by the Las Vegas Philharmonic.  In 2024, Audrey was honored as an Artist Fellow in Music at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida. Her orchestral work, Speakeasy: Vignettes of the Roaring Twenties, was commissioned by the Jackson Symphony Orchestra in honor of 100th anniversary of women's suffrage. Supported partially by a Votes for Women Suffrage Centennial grant from the Washington State Historical Society, Speakeasy is an orchestral celebration of women’s suffrage and the music, philosophy, fashion and excess that flared into being in the 1920s and became embodied by the empowered Flapper. This work for full orchestra is structured as four vignettes, allowing for performance as a complete symphonic work or as selections.

 

Many of Audrey’s artistic collaborations center around leading change by combining important issues and themes with music – from mental health, to sustainability, to women’s suffrage. One of her earliest collaborative works is the forward-looking 2008 collaboration with visual artist Hsiu-Ching Lin and dancer Pam Kuntz called The Mind of Anxiety, for which she self-produced a 40-minute 5.1 surround sound electronic score. This immersive, all-woman multimedia production combined music with modern dance, textile installation, video, and lighting design, and was one of the first of its kind aimed at bringing awareness to mental health on college campuses.

 

Audrey’s music has been commissioned, read, and/or performed by the Jackson Symphony Orchestra, Lansing Symphony Orchestra, Salina Symphony, Eighth Blackbird, ORCA4tet, Firehouse Performing Arts, Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival, and the Sitka Music Festival. Recent performance highlights include the world premiere of her work Queen's Bath, Kaua’i for string quartet and harp, which was part of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra's Planet Earth chamber music program in celebration of Earth Day. Her orchestral work Speakeasy was featured on the opening concert of 2023-2024 season for the Salina Symphony in Kansas alongside the GRAMMY award-winning Cuban jazz pianist Ignacio ‘Nachito’ Herrera performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

 

In parallel with her artistic output, Audrey has more than two decades of experience in music education and arts leadership. Audrey holds a master’s degree in music composition from Western Washington University, along with a Women’s Leadership Program certificate from the Yale School of Management. She leverages her unique blend of artistic and leadership training to envision innovative educational experiences with particular focus on cultivating creativity and artistic freedom in young artists. She is the founder and executive director of the non-profit, With Music and Creativity for All, where she is focused on nurturing musical creativity and freedom in kids and young adults while making private study more accessible. As part of this work she maintains a private studio of piano, clarinet, and composition students currently based in Ann Arbor, Michigan with discounted or free music lessons for income-qualified families. She is currently leading a capital campaign to reach a goal of 5 additional endowed private study scholarships to award for the 2025-2026 academic year. 

 

Outside of her private teaching, Audrey gives guest lectures and pre-concert talks, teaches masterclasses, curates new music programs and leads community outreach for organizations which have included the Bellingham Festival of Music in Washington state, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Salina Symphony, and Jackson Symphony Orchestra. She has taught upper division undergraduate composition, theory, and orchestration courses, and was invited as a guest composer to teach a seminar for young composers as part of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Civic Youth Ensembles program.

 

A leader of progressive organizational change in the arts for more than 15 years, Audrey has held leadership roles overseeing governance, capital campaigns, production management, and artistic planning with the Bellingham Festival of Music, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has provided marketing and publicity strategy consultancy for GRAMMY award-winning classical recording projects, and she was part of a team which facilitated the DSO’s participation in the League of American Orchestras’ Inclusive Stages national initiative to increase the racial diversity of musicians in American orchestras. The creation of her curated concert series, Votes For Women, was supported by a Washington State Historical Society Votes for Women Suffrage Centennial grant, and brought together Principal musicians from the Atlanta and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, and more, for performances of music composed by women. Highlighting an important link between voting rights and long-term cultural enfranchisement in the arts, this concert series asks audiences to pledge more “votes” for women in the concert hall by gaining an awareness of, then attending and supporting, increased classical programming of music composed by women.

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Aside from music, Audrey is an experienced hiker and traveler. Recently she was awarded an inaugural composer residency at one of North America’s most remote artist retreats. Accessible only by boat, the northern campus of the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Canada is located in the wilderness on the southwestern border of Ontario’s 7,700 square kilometer Algonquin Provincial Park. She has recorded soundscapes while backpacking the Peruvian Amazon with Patrick Harlin (also a composer and soundscape artist), summitted Mt. Rainier in Washington state which, at 14,410 feet, is the tallest and most glaciated singular peak in the contiguous United States, and has traversed the 22 mile round-trip Kalalau Trail along Kaua’i’s Nāpali Coast; rated as a 9 out of 10 difficulty by The Sierra Club, it is consistently listed as one of the most beautiful and dangerous hikes in the world.

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For more, follow her on Instagram @audreykelleymusic. 

 

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