Kellie Jo Close is a transformative multimedia artist and mental health advocate based in Lebanon, Indiana.
For Women Who Want to Know Exactly What They Buried. And Why.
Kellie Jo Close makes art for the old soul. The empath. The one who feels everything, reads every room, and has spent her life being called too sensitive and too much. You held it all together for years. Somewhere under all that holding, you put parts of yourself in the ground. Kellie Jo makes the tools for going back to find them.
Based in Lebanon, Indiana, Kellie Jo is a multimedia artist and mental health advocate. Her work centers on handmade dolls in three lines: You-Do-You Voodoo™, SoulStitch™, and JoJo’s Oddities™. Each one is rooted in Jungian psychology and a search for meaning that runs deep. Every doll holds weight: emotional charge, old memory, the parts of you that learned to stay quiet.
Kellie Jo writes and makes from lived experience. She has depression and PTSD. She has survived domestic violence and the kind of trauma that rewires a body. Some days the simplest task costs everything she has. That truth lives inside every doll she builds. It is the reason her work tells the plain truth about mental illness and trusts you to hold it.
Before the dolls, there was the work itself. Kellie Jo founded and ran a peer mentoring program for women leaving abusive relationships, training survivors to support other survivors through active listening and safety planning. That work taught her what no theory could: the plain truth keeps a woman alive. Every doll carries what she learned there.
The dolls are made to be used. They anchor the nervous system. They give a home to the parts of you that got exiled to keep the peace. You hold one, set an intention, and do the slow work beside it. Recovery here is capacity: the return of your power to feel, remember, reflect, and keep standing under real weight.
Every doll carries intention chosen for the one who will keep it. Every compositional element has a purpose and they all work together to support you. Through commissioned pieces, premade pieces, and workshops, Kellie Jo builds the dolls as instruments for your own excavation.
Knowing what you buried, and why, is where the power lives. It comes from integration: holding the whole truth of what happened with enough understanding to carry it on your own terms. That is what her work is built for.
Come see what is available now. Or reach out about a custom doll made for your own reckoning. Kellie Jo will meet you in the truth, and the doll will stay.
Find Kellie Jo’s books on her Amazon Author Page and promotions on Pinterest.