Professor Elizabeth Kelly is an internationally recognized composer and senior academic leader with extensive experience in music higher education, artistic practice, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. She brings a strong track record of developing and leading music programs and research that integrate creativity, interdisciplinarity and industry engagement.

Alongside her academic leadership, Professor Kelly maintains an active international composing career. Her work has been performed and broadcast worldwide at major venues and festivals including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Southbank Centre in London, and the Gaudeamus Festival in the Netherlands. Her compositional output spans opera and music for a wide range of forces, from large-scale orchestral works to projects involving DJs, digital media, and emerging technologies.

In her work, Professor Kelly is particularly known for her novel approaches to musical storytelling, placemaking, audience engagement, and bringing together musicians from diverse traditions. Interdisciplinary collaboration is central to her practice, and she has worked extensively with choreographers, poets, filmmakers, and computer scientists.

Her work has been supported by numerous commissions, grants, and awards from leading cultural and research organizations, including BBC Radio 3 Proms, UK Research & Innovation, the British Academy, Arts Council England, the PRS Foundation, Opera America, and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

Professor Kelly has held senior leadership roles in higher education most recently as Head of the Department of Music at the University of Nottingham. In this role, she led academic strategy, research development, and external partnerships, co-leading the university’s Creative & Digital Research Cluster and serving as university lead for the Universities for Nottingham partnership with the BBC Concert Orchestra.Professor Kelly is passionate about empowering young people’s musical creativity, and she has led inclusive music composition education initiatives, which have reached thousands of children across the UK and US.

She holds a PhD in Music Composition from the Eastman School of Music and degrees from Yale University, the University of Michigan, and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.