Kelly Wacker is an art historian, educator, writer, and naturalist living on the ancestral homeland of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation in central Alabama.

She is interested in the intersections of art, art history, and natural history. She curated the ten-person exhibition, The New Naturalists, that focused on artists exploring the liminal spaces of nature and culture.

A Professor of Art History at the University of Montevallo, she also teaches an environmental studies course, Art and the Environment. Additionally, she has team-taught a cross-disciplinary course, Art + Zoology | Zoology + Art, designed for art and biology majors. This course focused on building bridges between disciplines with emphasis on observation, drawing, art history, zoology, environmental crisis, and citizen science.

Wacker is also a published fiction writer whose stories center on nature, art, and love. Currently, she is enrolled in the Alabama Master Naturalist program and is engaged in a public art history project about a little known Colorado landscape artist, Newt Thomas.