Writing
I specialize in nonfiction essays and performance texts.
Most recently, I worked on the New York Times bestseller Do The Work: An Antiracist Activity Book by W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz. I write a newsletter of personal essays about embodiment called Fancy Meeting You Here. My theatrical writing has been staged at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Stage Werx, University of California, Berkeley, the Torch Theatre, and Arizona State University. My academic work has been published in TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and the Canadian Theatre Review. I’ve received grants from the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Here are some of my favorite publications:
Fancy meeting you here by kelly rafferty
Over on Substack, I write a newsletter about the quest for queer embodiment. You can read it or listen to it by clicking the link below.
Do The Work: An Antiracist Activity Book by W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz
I served as an editorial consultant and writer on this New York Times bestselling workbook that presents an accessible path to getting involved in anti-racist activism.
Regeneration: Tissue Engineering, Maintenance, and the Time of Performance by Kelly Rafferty
This essay, published in TDR/The Drama Review, recasts the Tissue Culture and Art Project's Pig Wings Project (2002) within a genealogy of feminist maintenance art, highlighting bioart's capacity to engage meaningfully with gender, race, and class in biotechnology.
The Wendy House by Heather Warren-Crow and Kelly Rafferty
Published in Women's Studies Quarterly, this script is a textual fragment of The Wendy House, a 2012 performance installation that attempted to stage the question, Why is the language of empire still enchanting, even though its power is held together by duct tape and its magic is revealed to be nothing but glitter and shadows?