Professor Kelly came to the UW in 2002 as a Distinguished Visitor and then joined the UW law school faculty in 2002. She directs the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic and teaches Family Law and Child Advocacy. She is the co-author of Adoption Law: Theory, Policy and Practice (2006).

As Associate Dean, Professor Kelly works with faculty on professional development and interfaces with the Director of Human Resources on Staff matters. She also works closely with the program directors of the Clinical Law Program, Gates Public Scholars Program, and the Court Improvement Training Academy as well as the Center for Career Planning and Public Service. Professor Kelly is also the Chair of the Statewide Children's Respresentation Workgroup established by the Washington Supreme Court Commission on Children in Foster Care.

Professor Kelly began her career practicing civil rights and family law in Arkansas, where she was local counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund for ten years. She began teaching at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and moved from there to West Virginia University College of Law, where she attained the status of tenured full professor. In 1996, she won the Association of American Law School's National Scholarly Paper Prize for her work entitled Race and Place: Geographic and Transcendent Community in the Post-Shaw Era, published in the Vanderbilt Law Review.

In West Virginia, Professor Kelly developed a multi-disciplinary training for law students to serve as guardians ad litem in dependency cases, which resulted in adding nearly 100 student attorneys to serve children in foster care. She was the reporter for the West Virginia Law Institute's Adoption Reform Project, which was the catalyst for legislative action on the state's adoption statute. She was also instrumental in influencing legislative change in West Virginia custody law.