Lily is originally from New York, NY, with a Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama from the joint programs of University of California, San Diego and Irvine. Lily holds a B.A. (summa cum laude) in Classics from Barnard College, Columbia University and a diploma from Phillips Academy, Andover.

After her postdoctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin, she worked as a cultural journalist and theater and dance critic for NPR Berlin and Exberliner Magazine, as well as writing blogs for major international festivals such as Theatertreffen and Tanz im August. The only thing more fun than writing about theater is making it. Her favorite theater experiences have included performing as a golem in Lauren Yee's The Hatmaker's Wife [A Man, His Wife, and His Hat] at the Moxie Theater in San Diego, California, and staging an interactive performance installation (Temporary Autonomous Zone of Caring) on the streets of Berlin in the dead of winter.

Lily Kelting's current research focuses on performance artists using food as a medium to create new languages around race, gender and ethnicity in supposedly "postracial" contemporary Germany. Previous work on white nostalgia's performative role in the "new U.S. southern food" movement has been published in Food, Culture and Society, Southern Quarterly, and Paragrana. Her teaching interests reflect her range of research-- from "Food on Film" to "Critical Theory for Theatermakers".