Chelsea Wills works and lives in Northern California, . She is an artist, writer, educator, and community organizer whose work centers memory, imagination, and reverent curiosity.

Her work exists at the nexus of place, change, and stories. This takes her to faraway places, like Mayan kitchens, crumbling haciendas, and megacity markets of Mexico, and also close to home, from the shoreline of Northern California and the last tenacious farms in the Silicon Valley to her own home garden. She explores places in flux and work closely with people inhabiting them. Her studio practice is interdisciplinary and conceptually based, choosing the right mediums and tools for each project. These can include community organizing and teaching, ethnographic research, agricultural practices, and archiving, as well as more traditional media such as photography, painting, and dyeing. She often collaborates with scientists, farmers, and cooks in my work. She draws heavily on her long-term interests in food, plants, and everyday things. Her curiosity often brings her to the margins of familiar things, the places in-between traditional and modern, wild and tame, science and art.

She holds a Master’s degree from UC Berkeley in Arts Education and BA from UC Santa Cruz. She has shown work nationally and internationally at museums and galleries such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Arts, and the London Biennale. She has lectured at Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Projects have been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Lab SF, San Jose Museum of Art, the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, Oakopolis , SubRosa, Kaleidoscope, and Big Umbrella Studios ; and internationally as part of the London Biennale and at COMEXUS, Casa Hilvana, and Teatro Felipe Carillo Puerto. Currently she is an Equity Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. ears of experience with intersectional organizing with food sovereignty and labor through online and in person education, facilitation of community-based research, and creative event production.

She has given talks at Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. In 2016-17 she was an Equity Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Most recently she published the Home of Milk (Bottlecap Press, 2024), Love Letters from the Moon (self published, 2017) and Teach Me How To (Works Progress Agency, 2020).