Kelly has been a self-proclaimed professional character artist since she was four years old. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, she spent most of her childhood avoiding playing outside and instead stayed in watching cartoons and engrossed in drawing and coloring books recreating all her favorite animated characters. By the second grade, she confidently believed that she could draw SpongeBob from memory, even if it more accurately resembled DoodleBob,

She spent most of her time immersed within her own imagination, reading, taking art classes, and filling up sketch books with different characters she created. Her fantasies and daydreams convinced her that she would someday be able to create her own characters and work on animated films and TV. Somewhere between high school and college however, she started to question her abilities and let her doubts cloud her judgment about how realistic it was to have a career in animation. While she still had her art as a form of escapism, she struggled with deciding her career path when she started attending Texas A&M University.

Before even her first day of college, she switched majors from Early Childhood Education to Allied Health, but this decision made her feel more unsure and inauthentic to who she was. She made a habit of wandering past the art building when she was feeling lost and wondering what kind of work the students were doing inside. By the end of Howdy Week, she realized that she would never forgive herself if she didn’t at least try to pursue her dreams as a character artist. She immediately applied to transfer into the Visualization Program at Texas A&M. Knowing absolutely nothing about Computer Graphics and 3D Art, she quickly found herself in a completely different avenue that she never expected for creating art and characters and bringing them to life. After spending hours completely immersed in Maya for the first time, exploring all the different tools in the software, she realized she was finally where she was meant to be. She spent most of her undergraduate years focusing on 3D modeling for environments, character rigging, and building up her caffeine tolerance. After graduating amidst the pandemic in 2020, she was reminded of how uncertain life could be and decided to pursue her master’s degree at her alma mater as a backup plan so she could still pursue her alter ego’s dream of becoming an old hippie art teacher.

During her time in grad school, she was encouraged to pursue other aspects of CG by her teachers and mentors, which led her to exploring hair creation and look development for characters. While also taking online 3D character modeling classes and doing personal projects on the side, she realized that she didn’t want to pick a singular focus, and she happily fell into place as a CG Generalist. She still can’t believe she’s able to work as an artist at Nickelodeon Animation and be a part of the studio that led her to pursue art in the first place.