b. 1984 Reno, Nevada
lives and works on Bainbridge Island, Wa.

Chelsea Wills is an interdisciplinary artist. 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. She holds a Master’s degree from UC Berkeley in Arts Education and has shown her work nationally and internationally at museums and galleries such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, the London Biennale, and as part of the Fulbright program in Mexico City. She has given artist talks at Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. In the past few years she served as an Equity Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Her studio practice is interdisciplinary and conceptually based, choosing the right mediums and tools for each project. These have included 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. 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.

Chelsea Wills

Chelsea Wills

Collective Work