Kelly Gabriel Lee is a San Francisco Bay Area native, who spent his adolescence trapped on a Dali-esque dark ride (with a never-expiring “D” ticket). He still believes that his runaway shadow is hiding in a bureau somewhere in New York City (possibly archived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Relentlessly journeying across an idiosyncratic version of the time/space continuum, his pursuits include second-hand bookstores, modernist art (including German/Austrian Expressionism and the Russian avant-garde) and literature, Japanese woodblock prints, vintage Disney art, Tintin, transit maps from around the world, magical mystery tours, Ellery Queen novels, Jedi mind tricks, theatrical performances of all sorts, the music of Joni Mitchell, and shaggy dogs and culture hounds with wagging tails.
A refugee from the corporate world, Kelly has devoted most of his employment working for an exhausting series of arts/cultural/educational nonprofits that have included publishing companies, a media organization, historical societies, performing arts organizations, and children’s museums.
Academia: Kelly has a BA in English literature from UC Berkeley (Summa Cum Laude), an MA in InterArts (with an emphasis on multimedia theater) from SF State University, and a PhD in Integral Studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he pursued an interdisciplinary curriculum in art history and archetypal psychology. He also has a Certificate in Museum Studies from JFK University. Kelly is insistent that would have been a university professor had he been able to find an interdisciplinary department that combines literature, art history, theater and performance studies, film, world mythology, and all his interests as suggested above.
Kelly Gabriel Lee 