She had an interest in the performing arts from a very young age, and cites her experiences at a dance school in Birmingham as having had a formative impact on her life.

Kelly has toured with the British Youth Opera in Italy, France and London, performing in the choruses of La bohème, Don Giovanni and Eugene Onegin.

[3] Kelly has performed with English Touring Opera as Despina in Così fan tutte and as a member of the chorus in Simon Boccanegra, Don Pasquale, Il tabarro, La clemenza di Tito and The Siege of Calais.

[3] Also, she has been part of the company's educational programme, "Midnight Moon", and her account of her involvement appears on the ETO's website as well as in the Birmingham Post, where she also describes the experience: "In these kinds of projects I get to connect with the audience in a way that you can't when you're performing an opera on stage....To be able to sing and interact so closely with people with such profound disabilities is a very special thing.

In Richard Chew's Mary Seacole, The Opera, she played the roles of a young Jamaican girl and Mrs Grant, and sang in Mass Carib by Felix Cross as part of the Greenwich and Docklands Festival with Nitro Theatre Company.

She has performed in Jamaica, Hungary, Montserrat, Grand Cayman, Luxembourg, Poland and toured Germany as part of the Arianna Consort.

[21] In August 2020, English Touring Opera did an online feature "In Conversation with Abigail Kelly, Maciek O'Shea and Omar Shahryar".