Kelly S. Williams is a painter and educator and is currently based in Nashville, TN.  She earned her BA from Vassar College and her MFA from SAIC in Chicago.  She is represented by David Lusk Gallery and often exhibits with her old mentor, painter Michelle Grabner, at the arts project space The Suburban.

Artist and Omnifold curator Jonathan Lisenby sat down with Kelly in her Germantown home-studio to talk about adjusting to life after art school, the peculiar mysticism of the South, the effects of Nashville's recent intense gentrification on artist spaces, and the tondo versus the mandala, among other things.