Heather Kelley

Heather Kelley (she/her) is an actor, educator, and theatre administrator. She is a former company member of the New York Neo-Futurists and Mad Dog Theatre Company, and performed for many seasons with South Brooklyn Shakespeare. Most recently, Heather served as Director of Audience Services for Premiere Stages, the Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, and taught acting for non-majors in Kean's Department of Theatre. She is the recipient of a 2019 State of New Jersey Senate & General Assembly Citation commending her work with Plainfield Senior Citizens Services as an actor and teaching artist, and received a 2019 New Jersey Theatre Alliance Award of Excellence honoring her contributions to professional, non-profit theatre throughout the state. She holds a BFA in Acting from the University of the Arts, and an MFA in Acting from Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory.

Heather's current research focuses on dark tourism, ghosts as manifestations of trauma, haunted attractions, mediumship as performance, and depictions of the supernatural on stage and on screen. If you are a theatre patron and/or practitioner that has experienced unexplained and/or paranormal phenomena in a theatre or theatre-related structure, Heather invites you to contribute to her research by submitting your story here (you are very welcome to do so anonymously).

Book Review of Carolyn Grattan Eichin’s From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West for Theatre History Studies 41 (Fall 2022).
Book Review of Sarah Balkin’s Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage for Supernatural Studies 7, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2021).