Kelly Thomas, President
Length of Service: July 2017
she/her
Kelly uses her creativity every day as a professional contracts negotiator and has 18 years of experience in contracts and corporate/regulatory compliance roles. She is a Senior Business Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation, where she currently focuses on data protection, privacy, and information security contractual requirements for suppliers and partners. Kelly strives to lead with empathy and inclusivity, and feels energized by collaborating with diverse teams and cultivating lasting relationships with her colleagues and customers. While her daily work involves avoiding ambiguity in contracts and other technical documents, Kelly loves how poetry and metaphor allow us to play with the fuzzy edges and grey areas of language and evoke powerful emotions and images.
Kelly graduated from Ohio University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Art Education. After searching for a meaningful volunteer opportunity that would leverage her background and prior experience working with youth, Kelly found Art from Ashes through social media posts, checked out the website, and began volunteering with the agency in 2017. She has served on the Events Team and as a co-facilitator for Phoenix Rising and Drawing on Air workshops.
In 2021, Kelly chose to deepen her commitment to Art from Ashes by joining the Board of Directors. In her role she hopes to ensure a sustainable future for the agency, so that youth will have the opportunity to experience the transformative power of our award-winning curriculum.
Kelly also loves to be outdoors and surrounded by green growing things, and her newest adventure is beekeeping. When Colorado winters interfere with growing preposterous numbers of tomatoes, you’ll find her happily cultivating her indoor jungle. Her definition of pure bliss is taking camping and hiking trips with her husband and two teenage sons to places with lots of water and no Internet.
Return to our team
