NICOLE KELLY FKA NK
Nicole Kelly (NK) is a writer, audio producer, and award winning story editor whose work has been featured by ZZYZZVA, VICE, Afropunk, the Barbican Centre, and The Heart, and has been called both “visceral” and “shockingly intimate.” She is the creator and producer of Basket Case, an immersive, narrative series about the unsteady terrain between mental health and mental illness. The series was an International Women’s Podcast Award finalist.
Before working primarily in literary audio,
I received an MFA from the Programs In Writing at UC Irvine and my fiction appeared in ZYZZYVA, Fiction Southeast, the Best Small Fictions anthology, and elsewhere. I was a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.
As the programming director at the Feminist Center for Creative Work in LA, I edited Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication for Co-Conspirator Press and curated programming in collaboration with artists in residence — connecting the work of our visual artists to the writing of Audre Lorde and the theory of Sarah Ahmed, to the #metoo movement, to historical feminist art movements, to prison abolition, and more.
During the same time period, I co-created bitchface, an independent, experimental audio project about art, power, gender, and other obsessions. bitchface performed with (NPR-affiliate) KCRW and the One Archives, presented at Union Docs, the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and Third Coast International Audio Festival, and produced the 2020 season of The Heart (one of The Atlantic magazine’s “50 Best Podcasts of 2020”). The three part series “Divesting From People Pleasing” (The Heart) — an audio memoir about unlearning shame — was called “a shockingly intimate portrait of what it means to be alive in a human body” by the New York Times.
WHITE DRAG, an original performance for SORORITY (Lyric Hyperion Theater, Los Angeles, 2017) was reproduced as audio essay for bitchface. The audio essay was featured on Afropunk’s Solutions Sessions podcast & the CBC’s Podcast Playback, and was the basis for a TV pilot treatment commissioned by SuperDeluxe.
I was an AIR Edit Mode Fellow, and a contributing editor on an episode of Invisibilia.
I was the story editor on the award winning first season of the Zim-Australian audio drama Private Affairs, a romantic comedy, and edited 2 award winning seasons of The Anti Trans Hate Machine, an investigative series about the far right.
I was a 2025 AIR New Voices Mentor.
WORK WITH ME
INTERVIEW: BE WELL, SIS
You’re Not a Basket Case: Reclaiming Your Mental Wellness with NK | Be Well, Sis Podcast
EIGHT MENTAL HEALTH PODCASTS TO HELP YOU SURVIVE 2025 | Lifehacker
INTERVIEW: THE WERKING WRITER'S PODCAST
Nicole Kelly On Self-Sabotage, Ego Death, & Becoming a Working Writer | WWP No. 17
INTERVIEW: TELLING STORIES
#7: Nicole Kelly | Telling Stories Podcast