Kelly Sears uses experimental animation techniques to reframe and reconfigure source imagery – often instructional, archival, and historical – to mutate the narratives, behaviors, and ideologies embedded in these frames. Her films draw on documentary and speculative fiction storytelling as she recasts American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our social and political legacies and futures.  In the process of collaging, cutting out, and untethering images from their intended use, she creates slippages between the familiar and the fantastic.

Her films have been screened at festivals such as Sundance, Slamdance, South by Southwest, American Film Institute, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and museums such as MoMA, The Hammer Museum, and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Solo programs of her films have screened at the Pacific Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Cinematheque.   Her films have won awards at festivals such as Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Black Maria, Chicago Underground, and Oak Cliff, among others.

She is an Associate Professor in the Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts Department at the University of Colorado Boulder.