Ikwe

Kelsey Van Ert is an African American and Ojibwe artist and musician from St. Paul–Minneapolis, based in Brooklyn. A first-generation descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, her multidisciplinary practice includes music composition, storytelling, audio-visual installation, and hand drum making. She is a two-time Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Grant recipient (2018, 2019) and received the 2022 AudioFemme Agenda Grant. In 2018, she was an Artist-in-Residence at The Shed, where she developed the music and storytelling piece MAKADEWIIYAASIKWE (“a woman of African descent” in Ojibwe). Her work has been presented at The Wyckoff House, Lincoln Center Out of Doors with La Casita, Brooklyn Prelude Festival, SECCA (NC), Buckham Gallery (MI), Wa Na Wari (WA), and Blindside Gallery in Melbourne Australia. Kelsey holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MA in Music Technology from NYU Steinhardt, where she developed a virtual Indigenous hand drum.