About

I’m a Chicago PR specialist with more than 30 years of experience representing non-profit performing arts organizations including theaters, dance companies, music organizations and festivals. Current clients include Chicago Children’s Theatre, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Chicago Jazz Orchestra, Collaboraction Theater Company, the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA, producer of Destinos, the Chicago International Latino Theater Festival), Paramount Theatre, RiverEdge Park, Rough House Theater Co., Shattered Globe Theatre, Theater Wit and TimeLine Theatre Company.

I also work with non-profits and associations including the International Housewares Association and the Community Foundation of the Fox River Valley.

I launched Jay Kelly PR in July 2017 after seven years as Vice President of Arts and Culture at L.C. Williams & Associates, a mid-size PR firm. While there I also spent three years as an adjunct marketing professor at The Theatre School at DePaul University in the performing arts management program.

For 15 years before that, I ran Off Loop PR, representing clients including Apple Tree Theater, Court Theatre, the League of Chicago Theatres, Lookingglass Theatre, Metropolis Performing Arts Center, Northlight Theatre, Thodos Dance Chicago and Victory Gardens Theater. In 2007, I went “client side” for two years as Director of Marketing and PR at Victory Gardens Theater.

I graduated with a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and immediately moved to the “big city,” Chicago, starting my career as an assistant account executive at the multi-national PR agency Hill & Knowlton, followed by four years at the mid-sized firm Aaron Cushman & Associates. After gaining agency experience, and hitting the pause button for a life-changing, four-month sabbatical in Europe, I decided to go out on my own and only represent clients that truly mattered to me.

Today, I reside in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood with my wife, Alicia Gonzalez, a foreign language teacher at a top CPS high school. We have two children, Sam (27), and Pilar (21). I enjoy walking my dogs, biking the 606, and volunteering on the PR team for Indivisible Chicago, the city’s grassroots, progressive GOTV coalition.

Contact:
jaykellypr@gmail.com or 312.315.3935

Photo credit: the great Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune