About Anna
Dr. Anna Kelles is a public health scientist, environmental advocate, and New York State Assemblymember representing the 125th District, which includes Tompkins County and southwest Cortland County.
Born and raised in Tompkins County, Anna studied biology and environmental science before spending four years in Ecuador, where she taught high school biology and worked as an ecological guide in the Amazon. She later earned a PhD in Nutritional Epidemiology and built a career in teaching, nutrition, and nonprofit leadership before entering public service.
Anna first served for five years on the Tompkins County Legislature, where she worked directly on housing, human services, environmental planning, and public safety. This experience gave her a close view of both what local government can accomplish and where communities depend on action from the state.
Anna was elected to the State Assembly in 2020 and took office in January 2021. She now chairs the Legislative Commission on Rural Resources, where she works to ensure that state policy accounts for the different needs and resources of rural communities. She also serves on the Assembly Committees on Agriculture, Correction, Environmental Conservation, Health, Higher Education, and Housing. Anna is a member of the Legislative Women’s Caucus and serves on its Executive Board.
Legislative Work and Accomplishments
Anna is best known statewide for sponsoring and passing New York’s first-in-the-nation moratorium on certain proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining operations. The law responded to the reopening of fossil-fuel power plants to supply enormous amounts of energy for cryptocurrency mining. It paused new or expanded permits for these operations while requiring the State to study their effects on the climate and surrounding communities.
This work led Anna to examine how New York should prepare for other rapidly growing industries with significant demands for energy, water, and public infrastructure. As large data centers began to be proposed across the state, she introduced legislation requiring companies to disclose their resource use and preventing them from shifting infrastructure costs onto utility customers. She also introduced a moratorium so the State could understand the cumulative effects of the industry before approving more large projects. Major provisions from three of her bills were incorporated into comprehensive data-center legislation passed by both houses of the Legislature in 2026.
Anna’s environmental work often looks for ways to meet one need without sacrificing another. When she saw growing conflict between solar development and the preservation of active farmland, she developed an agrivoltaics research program in partnership with Cornell University. The program received $2 million over three years to study how solar panels and farming can successfully coexist on the same land. She has also passed laws preventing the use of carbon dioxide for fracking and expanding the availability and use of native plants throughout New York.
Other legislation has grown directly from problems faced by people and service providers in her district. When Ithaca Carshare was in danger of closing because it could not obtain insurance, Anna passed legislation creating a viable insurance pathway for nonprofit car-sharing organizations. This allowed Ithaca Carshare to reopen and preserved a model that is now available to communities across the state.
She also worked with emergency medical service providers to change a Medicaid rule that only reimbursed an ambulance service if it brought a patient to a hospital emergency room. The law Anna passed allows EMS providers to be reimbursed when they treat a patient where they are or bring them to a more appropriate healthcare setting. Patients can receive the care their condition requires without an unnecessary emergency-room visit, and ambulances can return to service more quickly.
Housing has been a central part of Anna’s work since her time in county government. She has introduced legislation with Senator Rachel May to modernize environmental review for qualifying housing built within existing communities. The proposal maintains environmental protections while addressing a process that can make lower-impact infill housing more difficult to build than development that sprawls into forests and onto existing farmland. This legislation served as inspiration for 2027 budget language. Anna also helped secure the inclusion of single-stair building reform in the state budget, allowing New York to consider safe, more flexible designs for apartment buildings with a smaller footprint and more open building layout.
Anna approaches criminal justice with a focus on public safety, accountability, rehabilitation, and the conditions people will return to when they leave prison. She sponsors the Earned Time Act, which would allow incarcerated people to earn time off their sentences by completing educational, vocational, treatment, and rehabilitative programs. She also carries the CARE Act, which strengthens protections, healthcare support, nutrition and physical activity, maternal skills training, and privacy for people who are pregnant, giving birth, and recovering from childbirth while in custody.
In 2025, legislation Anna sponsored became law providing immunity to people engaged in sex work and victims of trafficking when they are victims or witnesses of serious crimes. The law allows someone to call for medical help, report violence, or assist law enforcement without the evidence they provide being used to prosecute them for prostitution. This makes it easier to report dangerous offenders and protects people who are especially vulnerable to violence and exploitation.
BEFORE THE ASSEMBLY
Anna earned dual bachelor’s degrees in biology and environmental studies from Binghamton University. After college, she moved to Ecuador, where her work as a teacher and ecological guide brought her into communities in the Andes and the Amazon. She returned to the United States to earn her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examined how urbanization affected health and behavior across generations in Cebu, Philippines.
Anna went on to teach at Ithaca College and Cornell University and served as Dean of the School of Nutrition at New York Chiropractic College. She helped develop professional standards for nutrition specialists, maintained a nutrition and wellness practice, and worked with nonprofit organizations supporting environmentally and socially responsible local economic development.
In 2015, Anna was elected to the Tompkins County Legislature, representing Fall Creek and Cornell Heights. During her five years in county government, she chaired committees overseeing health and human services, environmental planning, housing, and economic development. She worked to expand affordable housing and rural broadband, support alternatives to incarceration, protect immigrant communities, and prevent a proposed trash incinerator from being built on the shore of Cayuga Lake.
This work convinced her that many of the challenges local communities face cannot be resolved locally. Municipalities need the State to provide resources, remove barriers, and write laws that respond to very different conditions across New York. Anna ran for the Assembly to bring this local experience, along with her background in science and public health, to decisions made in Albany.