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Kelly Vincent

At twenty-one years of age, Kelly Vincent, is an emerging artist with a physical disability, and inseparable passions for writing and performance. She completed her high school work experience with No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability in 2004, and returned to work with the company during her university dropout phase (2007 & 2008), writing for and appearing in several No Strings Attached productions including And I You with Jo Stone (as part of the company's 2007 umbrella project Tempted), and A Little Ballerina's Agony which received a standing ovation at the Awakenings Festival in Horsham, Victoria in the same year.

Kelly left No Strings Attached at the end of 2008 with a renewed sense of self, faith in her abilities as an artist, and no (real) intention of looking back. She entered a university program in Professional Writing, but suffered anxiety attacks and temporary blindness whenever asked to do anything non-artistic. Within a month, she went blind again, forcing her to quit and run home to No Strings Attached. She planned to only stay a few months, while she got the artist out of her system, and then return to her language studies.

But she auditioned for and was accepted into No Strings Attached's performance training program, Preparing the Garden. At the same time, she was invited by Gaelle Mellis to participate in the creative development of a new dance theatre work, Take Up Thy Bed & Walk.

In 2009, Kelly was named co-winner of State Theatre's Young Guns playwrighting competition for her one-act play Gravity, and has since received a grant from the Richard Llewellyn Arts & Disability Trust to undertake a new creative development as writer/director of a theatre work entitled StartSpace.

When she is not writing, performing, or sitting round waiting until she can do it again, Kelly is reading, playing piano and making rash yet strangely fitting life choices. Why, just yesterday she decided that it is her calling to work part-time as a paraprofessional English-French interpreter, and eventually work her way up to interpreting for the Deaf. Perhaps even the Deaf French. We'll see.
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In the March 2010 state election, Kelly was elected to the South Australia's Legislative Council.  At the age of 21, Kelly Vincent makes political history as the youngest person elected to an Australian parliament, the first person to be elected to an Australian parliament on a disability platform, and the first member of the South Australian Legislative Council to serve from a wheel chair. Kelly is the leader of the Dignity for Disability party, and the only person to win an MP seat for which she will provide her own chair.