Kathleen Louise Velo

Kathleen Velo, 75, passed peacefully on October 15, 2025 in Tucson, Arizona, surrounded by family.

Kathleen (who also answered to Kate, and Mom, and Yaya) led a life defined by creativity, community, and connection. Whether in Chicago, or at Southern Illinois University, or in Milwaukee, or here in Tucson, she built lifelong relationships into the fabric of her life and legacy.

The fourth child of six, born on October 5, 1950 to Evelyn and Frank Velo, she grew up in a busy home on the south side of Chicago. Her community then was her family and her neighborhood, riding bikes and building forts in the prairie near her childhood home. As her creativity developed through the support of an influential art teacher at Fenger High School, those same prairie lands inspired her early photography and love for the outdoors. Preceded in her passing by her older brother Roger, she remained close to her siblings their entire lives, and they remember her as the sweetest sister and friend.

After graduating high school, she went to Southern Illinois University. She formed friendships there that lasted her whole life, and then she moved to Milwaukee. She was a part of the Community Home Services Coop, a community of folks who wrote grants to support housing services. This community worked and played together, and through this group she met Gerald “Jerry” Elias. They married on October 3, 1980 in Tucson, where she moved in 1979 to attend graduate school.

As their children Amber (1981) and Max (1984) grew, they joined the Second Street School community, where she would meet the friends that helped to define the rest of her life - connections like a second family, spending holidays and raising children together, and sharing in celebrations and heartbreaks. She began teaching at Palo Verde High School, impacting hundreds of students through photography, technology, and yearbook classes until her retirement. Throughout this time, she continued to cultivate her own artwork, refining pinhole photography techniques. She made cameras out of anything; her children recall being constant subjects and muses, and Kathleen was a regular in her kids’ classrooms, making cameras out of oatmeal canisters and sharing her love of the capture of light and the magic of photography.

Kathleen and Jerry divorced in 1992, but remained close friends - one more example of this remarkable woman who kept her people close. She had a bottomless well of capacity for people in her life, and often translated these connections into artistic expression. She was always working on a new project that redefined photography or expressed her own views of the world, and she built countless relationships through her creative pursuits because for her, artwork was a complete integration into her world, and so were the people who became a part of her beautiful story. She showed her art across the state and in cities across the country, and each project - whether her pinhole photos from France or taken in her backyard, or a series on the challenges of adolescence featuring the soundtrack of her very own heartbeat, or an examination of water quality observed through the alchemy of photochemical reactions, her work was ultimately, always, immensely human.

She pursued adventure, and never slowed down - whether it was spending a summer in France in the 90s, or completing a Fulbright year in England in the 2000s, or hiking the Grand Canyon (multiple times!), or backpacking in Arizona’s backcountry, or the countless travel adventures she took with her children, friends, and partner, she always had an eye toward the next adventure, and you can bet it would be captured in her art.

She moved to the Pima Verde neighborhood in 1985, into the home where she would raise her children and remain for the rest of her life. She welcomed countless neighbors, and as she did with so many communities and connections in her life, she left it all better than she found it. Spearheading the Van Buren Wash project, rallying the neighbors, leading cleanup crews, and advocating for and building a peaceful pocket park, she never tired in her pursuit of beauty, and connection, through the people around her.

An active member in the Tucson Artists Group, it was there she met Charles “Chip” Hedgcock, who started as her assistant on her seminal Water Flow project, and then became her partner for the rest of her life.

Her roots in Tucson’s community were deep and wide, serving on the Public Art and Community Design Committee, advocating for the expansion of the arts. But her connections were also deeply intimate - she had so many close friends, and somehow each relationship was unique and meaningful and authentic. From the many potlucks and dance parties with friends, to the GGs, who traveled and played games together every week, to her Desert Aunties group, to the exercise group that helped to keep her healthy and active, to her dear friends, with whom she hiked and shared stories and connections every week, and countless others she visited with and traveled to and kept in contact with, near and far, she built a galaxy out of the constellations of her friendships.

Anyone who knew her at all knew of her unwavering love for her grandchildren. “Yaya” to Max’s children Dominic (17) and Oliver (10), and Amber’s children Elliot (11) and Adeline (9), all of whom reside in Denver, she shared with them her love of art, connection, and the outdoors. She visited Denver regularly, arranged camping trips and special excursions with the kids together and separately, and had endless energy and enthusiasm for every story, every activity, and every opportunity to celebrate their lives. Her time with them was not long enough, but the legacy she has left with each of them will be imprinted on their sweet lives forever.

She is remembered as warm, empathetic, a wise and thoughtful confidante, an indomitable spirit and a passionate and creative visionary. Modeling strength and independence for her children, determined in her pursuit of joy and connection, a lover of life in all ways, the impact that she had on the world, and on the lives she touched, will outlast even the longest memories of her. She is survived in her passing by her brothers Ron and Jim, and her sisters Pam and Judy, and by her children, Amber and Max, her grandchildren Dominic, Elliot, Oliver, and Adeline, and her partner Chip.

This accounting of Kathleen’s remarkable life is not entirely sequential, but meant to be comprehensive. If you don’t see yourself reflected in these words specifically, please know that is an error of the author, and the very act of reading this imperfect effort means that you too were part of the fabric of the magnificent tapestry she wove with her life.

Her life will be celebrated with (how else?) a dance party in the spring. Please look for updates. In the meantime, take a hike, make some art, build a friendship - just as she would have wanted.

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