Terrance Kelly – Singer. Composer. Arranger. Choral Director. Mentor. Founding Artistic Director of the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir. Music Educator. Culture Bearer.

Terrance Kelly has spent more than four decades doing what few artists ever achieve: building something that outlasts any single performance, any single season, any single voice. As Founding Artistic Director of the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, he has grown what began as a workshop ensemble he assumed in his late teens into one of the Bay Area's most celebrated cultural institutions: an Emmy Award–winning organization that now unites more than 400 singers across multiple ensembles and stands as a national model for how music can bridge communities of every faith, background, and generation.

That founding story is inseparable from who Kelly is as an artist. He grew up in Oakland steeped in gospel music. His father, Mr. Ed Kelly, a jazz and gospel pianist and legendary name and an important force in the Oakland / Bay Area; his mother, Mrs. Faye Kelly, a choir director and pianist who led gospel ensembles at Allen Temple Baptist Church and Laney College. When Mrs. Kelly passed while Terrance was still in his late teens, he was asked to step in to lead the workshop she had directed. He never stepped away. What he built from that act of love and continuity carries her legacy in every rehearsal, every performance, every singer he trains. Black gospel music, in Kelly's hands, is not repertoire. It is inheritance: a living thread connecting audiences back to the ancestors whose songs of joy, resistance, and faith still move through the music today.

Known for his soaring operatic range, radiant joy, and magnetic stage presence, Kelly has performed alongside an extraordinary range of artists, from Linda Ronstadt and Andra Day to the Kronos Quartet and Lenny Kravitz, spanning gospel, jazz, classical, and pop. His arrangements have reached international stages: his setting of Silent Night was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser and broadcast on BBC Radio 3's A Gospel Christmas in December 2025. Closer to home, OIGC appears regularly with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall, and in 2023 performed at the inauguration ceremonies for Governor Newsom, Senator Barbara Lee, and several other state officials. And in early 2026, an ensemble performed with Charlie Puth, the Sainted Trap Choir and Color of Noize Orchestra at SuperBowl LX.

His honors reflect the breadth of that impact. Kelly holds an Emmy Award for his choral arrangement of OIGC's KGO-TV public service announcement, KQED's Local Heroes Award, the Dr. Edwin Hawkins Excellence Award, and the Bay Area Gospel Music Awards' "People's Choice Award," among many others. In 2021, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus presented him with its Inspiration Award, alongside other awardees that year who included Rita Moreno and LeAnn Rimes, for his championship of LGBTQ+ equality. In 2025, the San Francisco Boys Chorus named him their annual honoree.

Beyond the stage, Kelly is a teacher, a spiritual leader, and a culture bearer. He has traveled from Australia to Israel, Kenya to Canada, sharing the art and history of gospel music. He serves as Minister of Magnification at Imani Community Church in Oakland, and has directed the Gospel Choir at Jazz Camp West since 1982, mentoring generations of vocalists. Through the Ed & Faye Kelly Gospel Music Apprenticeship Program, funded three years in a row by the National Endowment for the Arts in the Folks Arts category for preservation, he ensures that this uniquely American music tradition entrusted to him keeps moving, keeps reaching, and keeps finding new voices to carry it forward.