Kelli Dunham is a trauma-informed stand up comic.

Which might sound like an oxymoron (or even just a really bad idea) but we promise you, it’s not. People can laugh about subjects they aren’t even ready to talk about yet.

Much of what Kelli is offering to campuses on the 23-24 school year is focused on the revolutionary nature of comedy, writing, storytelling and especially CREATING COMMUNITY by CREATING ART.

Curious? Kelli has tons of video on her YouTube channel, or you can check out Kelli sharing a hilarious and happy story about her mom (who originally ripped up Kelli’s birth certificate when Kelli came out as queer) You can watch Kelli performing at UPenn here AND you can experience Kelli presenting a virtual workshop-as-webinar Self Soothing For the Modern Queer And Other Folks With A Trauma History Who Need More Ideas

We’re including some of Kelli’s most requested college presentations and workshops below but if you just want to talk over what you’re looking for text Kelli directly at 215.964.1963. There’s also even more information on the pages that detail her health presentation and workshops, workshops for health science students, and Kelli’s extensive workshops offerings for healthcare and helping professionals to help build their LGBT health competency.

Some current favorites:

WHY IS MY FAMILY HECKLING ME? [BRAND NEW INTERACTIVE PRESENTATION]

When Kelli came out to her mom, her mom ripped up her birth certificate and sent it to Kelli. Subtle right? In this fun, interactive and ultimately practical presentation Kelli shares her hilarious and ultimately helpful story illustrates how the tenets of stand up comedy and improv and the skills learned from both can make visits with less than supportive families a little less soul-crushing. (60 minutes, can be bundled with optional Creating Community By Creating Art workshop on zine making, writing first person narrative, or writing and performing stand up comedy)

SECOND HELPING: A PRACTICAL QUEER TRAGICOMEDY [PRESENTATION & WORKSHOP]

SECOND HELPING Is Kelli’s newest presentation- it’s queer AF while at the same time having an extremely universal (argh we hate to even say this) yes, message.

Two dead girlfriends. Accidental enemy of Mother Teresa. An exploding knee replacement. Can award-winning queer storyteller and nonbinary ex-nun Kelli Dunham learn the limits of DIY-A (Do It Yourself Alone) approach to life before it’s too late?

Queer comedy at its best. You know, with a workshop where we collectively learn trauma recovery and emotional life skills. [59 minutes, optional related workshops including HELP, I NEED SOMEBODY: THE FINE QUEER ART OF ACCEPTING ASSISTANCE thrown in FOR FREE]. Read more about the SECOND HELPING journey and find more accepting help /building a helping team resources here.

Because SECOND HELPING and its related workshop are so widely accessible and relevant for varied audiences, it’s a great way for a college LGBT group to collaborate with other campus organizations to yes, of course,-have a bigger budget for bringing in a speaker AND to build valuable intersectional and connections. Some other presentations that lend themselves to this:

LAUGHTER AT THE END OF LIFE [PRESENTATION]

In this positive, fun and oddly uplifting presentation, Kelli details how patients, family members, and health care providers use humor in dealing with issues of serious illness, death, dying and bereavement. This presentation draws on Kelli’s more than twenty years as a community health nurse, and lived experience as the primary caregiver of two partners who died of cancer. If you want to be a hero, put this on in the LGBT center and invite everyone from schools of nursing, social work, disability studies and any other helping professions you have on your campus. Really. Trust us on this one.  (60 minutes, also available as an interactive workshop)

FIGHT, FLIGHT, FREEZE, LAUGH? [PRESENTATION]

One of Kelli’s most popular keynotes! As queerfolx (and many others!) with a history of trauma, we know there is nothing funny about what has happened to us but we’re always looking for better tools to manage the emotional and logistical impact of our post-trauma response. Enter intentional humor, stage left. In this keynote, we’ll learn the capacity (and limits) of laughter in mitigating our fight, flight and freeze responses, pick up some handy exercises to use in our own lives, and also have a surprisingly great time for a presentation about trauma! (60 minutes, available as an interactive workshop for smaller groups) 

GENDER REVEAL PARTY POOPER [PRESENTATION]

The newsworthy disasters of Gender Reveal Parties do make you wonder: is it really going that poorly for the cishets? In this brand new show, nonbinary comedian Kelli Dunham hilariously confirms, indeed it is not going and ask us “Is this performative gender nonsense emanating from something deeper? Are we all doomed to spend every Saturday afternoon in our 20s eating eating pink or blue BJ’s club cupcakes or is there another conversation we could be having?  An ex-nun in their natural habitat’ poking fun of the rigid gender binary (60 minutes, requires room with projection capacity)

NOT THE GYM TEACHER [PRESENTATION]

Kelli’s one-hour comedy/storytelling show (now an award-winning comedy album of the same name) in which you’ll learn about how Kelli’s relentless biological optimism causes problems while riding the subway, hear stories of Kelli’s ongoing confusion and conflict with her long time ex, Jesus and you’ll find out what –exactly– is so funny about an exploding knee replacement. (60 minutes)

Have we mentioned how adaptable many of these presentations are? Kelli has performed in auditoriums with 800 people, in the gymnasium (not ideal but okay if no one is also actively playing basketball), lecture halls, and for small classes. None of the presentations require anything more than a microphone, some interested students(or even kind of interested, Kelli will get them on board) and in a few cases, projection capacity. All presentations can be shortened to 45 minutes for class visits. 

Speaking of class visits, Kelli negotiates an all-you-can-metaphorically eat contract, meaning if she gets on a plane or a train or a bus, she wants to do, see, present, and talk with everyone she can in the time she is on campus.  Schedule all the class visits on topics like grief and death, writing (eight books published so far), nursing, spiritual care (the whole ex-nun thing), living on a boat (you don’t have a class like that?) or constructive uses of humor in the helping professions. Or even more you’ll think of poking around Kelli’s website or socials.

GRIEF: YOU’RE NOT DOING IT WRONG [INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP]

Even before the pandemic, many in under-resourced communities struggled with more than our share of grief. Now, in ongoing health crisis that is also a grief crisis, how can we move forward? In this workshop we’ll consider: what skills do we already have (as individuals and as a community) to support ourselves, our community and the greater world and what do we still need to develop? How can we process our own individual grief within the context of so much loss for so many and how can we stop feeling GUILTY for our own grief process? (60-90 minutes)

RADICAL NARRATIVES: CHANGING YOUR BODY’S STORY [PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOP]

It’s not always easy as LGBT and gender-nonconforming people to have loving relationships with our bodies. Change Your Body’s Story is a writing workshop designed to help us consider another narrative for the stories we hold in and about our physical selves. Using storytelling prompts and careful pacing, we’ll write , share and hold our collective stories and consider the possibility of different endings. it. (A nice feature of this workshop is students don’t have to identify as LGBT or trans or GNC to have a hard time with their bodies! This is a great (if intense) campus-wide activity.

CREATIVE SELF-SOOTHING FOR THE MODERN QUEER [INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP]

Calling all queer and trans trauma survivors! If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve developed some amazing self-help strategies for dealing with post-trauma symptoms, most of which probably involve some form of self-soothing. But you might have found that in particularly stressful situations: seeking healthcare, going through TSA, dealing with families of origin,  negotiating the dominant culture’s limited view of gender, etc you could use some more tools. In this workshop nonbinary nurse, comedian and all-around gentlenurturer human Kelli Dunham will lead participants through brainstorming new and novel ideas for self-soothing activities and strategies and we’ll also experiment with some of the strategies. You’ll leave with downloadable worksheets to help you develop your own self-soothing toolkit even further, and a downloadable / printable coloring sheet Kelli adapts for each individual workshop.

THE RAINBOW MEETS THE WHITE COAT: ADVOCATING FOR CHANGE AT THE COLLEGE RUN HEALTH CENTER {INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP]

LGBT healthcare college students have sometimes found misunderstanding or worse within the healthcare system and providers can be frustrated too with lack of information and systems that don’t bend with individual patient needs. In this workshop, Kelli Dunham, a bachelor’s prepared registered nurse with more than 15 years of experience in primary care and public health and an out queer/gender nonconforming person, will facilitate a problem solving discussion for college students on how to advocate for change within their college health care systems. The discussion will focus on two main questions: How does the system need to change to provide more culturally competent care for LGBT* people and how can LGBT people best advocate for themselves within the system that currently exists. Folks can email Kelli in advance with any questions, anecdotes or concerns you’d like introduced into the conversation: all names and identifying details will be changed. NOTE: This is adaptable to any systems on your campus that need to be changed to be more inclusive of LGBT students. Bring in an outsider and let THEM name the problem.

THE  RADICAL POWER OF QUEER STORYTELLING [INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP]

This workshop will introduce participant to the concepts of radical queer storytelling as used by the founders of Queer Memoir in their events. Participants will have a chance to participate in a radical storytelling mini workshop and story share and will leave with the skills needed to apply the tenets of radical storytelling/listening to their own activism and cultural work. [60-90 minutes in duration as workshop, with interactive storytelling can be longer] 

A note about IRL versus virtual: Kelli has been performing in a virtual environment since 2017 (see above) when she ran an interactive comedy show in on AltspaceVR known as Comedy House Sundays. Almost all the workshops and presentations Kelli provides in person can now be done virtually, either with students together or with students virtual as well. However, Kelli really loves the in person experience and starting in September 2023 will have a fair amount of date flexibility.

Virtual presentations can really save on costs since they eliminate the need for travel, but if you want an IRL experience and think you can’t afford it, consider some creative collaborations:

Combine a classroom lecture on “Free Speech + Comedy – Rape” (about how to subvert rape culture in comedy rather than perpetuating it) for TAKE BACK THE NIGHT and then have Kelli talk to the nursing students about the ABCs of Surviving Nursing School or Nursing Has 99 Problems, But TikTok’s Not One

Have Kelli run a queer storytelling workshop during the day and then host a storytelling event at night…a great way to build credibility and interest for a new LGBT group on campus (partner with women’s studies or the English department)

During LGBT HEALTH WEEK, bring in Kelli for a keynote, then offer a workshop for the health sciences students and social work students about LAUGHTER AT THE END OF LIFE.

Combining the resources your club has with the resources of other clubs and orgs is a great way to get a NATIONALLY KNOWN SPEAKER even if your budget is small.

Email Kelli at kellidunham+college@gmail.com or text her at 215.964.1963 and let’s get this party (or workshop or presentation or class visit or…) started!

Selected colleges credits (performing credits that is) include:

Baltimore County Community College (Baltimore, MD)- City College of New York (NYC)- Columbia University (NYC) Colorado State University (Fort Collins, CO) Drexel University (Philly, PA), Queens College (NYC),  Drexel University School of Medicine (Philly PA) Hampshire College (Amherst, MA) Hiram College (Hiram, OH) Hunter College (NYC) Lancaster County Community College (Lancaster County PA) New York University (NYC) Queens College, (Queens, NY) Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (Overbrook PA), Penn State University (College Station, PA), Plymouth State University (Plymouth, NH), The University of Pennsylvania (Philly, PA), St. Francis College (Brooklyn, NY), St. Luke’s College (Sioux City, IA), Smith College (Northampton, MA) SUNY Stoneybrook (Long Island, NY) Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA), Temple University (Philly, PA), University of Delaware (Wilmington, DE), University of MN (Minneapolis, MN), Widener University (Chester PA) Won Institute of Graduate Studies (Glenside, PA), and oh so so many more.