Mary Kelly.

Mary Kelly is Travel Editor at the International Herald Tribune, where she launched the dedicated section. She has lived abroad for over fourteen years, in Geneva, Nice, Ouagadougou, Cairo, and now Paris. Before settling in France, she was editor-in-chief of Egypt’s leading English-language magazine, Egypt Today, for over seven years.

An American visual artist, she studied fine arts and music at the College of Saint Teresa (Minnesota), then arts and aesthetics at the Pius XII Institute in Florence, before graduating from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London in 1970. Active in London since the late 1960s as an artist, teacher, curator, editor, and writer, she developed a body of work influenced by the rise of feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxist feminist analysis of the sexual division of labor.

Close to the History Group collective, alongside Juliet Mitchell and Laura Mulvey in particular, Mary Kelly’s work questions the social construction of femininity and the dynamics of domestic work. Influenced by minimalism and conceptual art, she participated in socially engaged projects such as Nightcleaners (1970-1975), an iconic documentary film about the mobilization of cleaning women in the United Kingdom.

She is the author of Paris Sketchbook, published by Éditions du Pacifique.