Award-winning illustration, visual journalism and political commentary seen on the arts, business, features and op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe

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Honors from the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, 
Society of Publication Designers, Print Design Annual, Communication Arts and the National Cartoonists Society


2012 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow


Named Best Newspaper Illustrator by the National Cartoonists Society in 2007
Illustrated and designed Stephen Colbert's Midnight Confessions (Simon & Schuster)
Weekly illustrations for The New York Times's Metropolitan Diary
OTHER EDITORIAL CLIENTS INCLUDE: The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Businessweek, The Atlantic, New York, The Washingtonian, The Hartford Courant, Esquire, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Congressional Quarterly, Kiplinger's, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Billboard, Forbes, Consumer Reports, Barron's, Men's Health, U.S. News & World Report, Chronicle Books
CORPORATE CLIENTS INCLUDE: Aetna, American Express, AT&T, Cisco, Cushman Wakefield, Georgia-Pacific, Humana, IBM, Macy's, McGraw-Hill, NBC-Universal, Nickelodeon, Nielsen Media Research, Omnicom Group, Razorfish, Scholastic Inc., Time Warner, The Smithsonian Institution, Vera Wang, Viacom

B I O
SEAN KELLY was first published at age 2 when his face filled the cover of The New York Daily News, as a curious spectator at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. He began earning money with his drawings at age 10, winning a national contest sponsored by Kellogg's which awarded him five dollars per week for a year. Today, as a professional, his income has grown.


Mr. Kelly graduated from Brown University and studied at Rhode Island School of Design and in London. While in college, he and his political cartoons were profiled in a wide range of national publications, from The Chronicle of Higher Education to USA Today, he won numerous top national awards for college cartoonists, and he was the first and only visual artist to win the Rolling Stone College Journalism Award. As a sophomore, he had his first drawing published in The New York Times.

Working on staff at The Miami Herald, he art directed the Sunday and daily Lively Arts section and his political illustrations and design filled the cover of the Viewpoint opinion section. 
Mr. Kelly then began freelancing in Washington, DC. He was based in New York City for a decade and currently lives in Southport, Connecticut.

 
Mr. Kelly is a frequent contributor to The New York Times where his visual commentaries appear on the Op-Ed Page. Mr. Kelly's graphic designs and illustrations have won awards from The Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Graphis, Communication Arts, The Society of Publication Designers, Print's Regional Design Annual, The Los Angeles Society of Illustrators and The Society for News Design, which gave him a Portfolio Award.


His work has been exhibited by The Museum of Cartooning and Comic Art, The Society of Illustrators, Parsons School of Design and New York's Town Hall Theater, and has been featured on The Huffington Post and the CBS News program Face The Nation.
From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Kelly's humorous images of life in New York City ran each week in The New York Times's popular column "Metropolitan Diary", a series which won numerous industry awards.
Since 2003, he has presented his Creativity Seminar which teaches academics, journalists, corporate executives and students how to use a wide variety of creative thinking techniques and tools to develop ideas and solve problems.
Sean Kelly was named Best Newspaper Illustrator by the National Cartoonists Society at its 2007 Reuben Awards ceremony, the Oscars of cartooning. He was also nominated for the award in 2006, 2009 and 2011. More information on his NCS award is here.
He was honored to be included in the 2009 book All The Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page by the esteemed art director Jerelle Kraus.
In 2012, Mr. Kelly was a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow.
Mr. Kelly has been a creative consultant for the philanthropic New York Community Trust, helping to formulate their communication strategy, designing their annual report and newsletters, and creating their ad campaigns for The New Yorker and WNYC Public Radio.
Sean Kelly is featured in The Brown Reader, a new book published In celebration of Brown University's 250th Anniversary. In this collection of essays, comics, and poems, 50 alumni writers, poets, and artists reflect on their time on College Hill. Along with Mr. Kelly, contributors include novelists Jeffrey Eugenides, Amity Gaige, Rick Moody, Edwidge Danticat, Donald Antrim, Marilynne Robinson and Meg Wolitzer, and playwrights Richard Foreman, Sarah Ruhl and Alfred Uhry. The Brown Reader was edited by Judy Sternlight and published by Simon and Shuster.
Mr. Kelly has been a guest lecturer at Columbia Journalism School, Brown University, the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism, the University of Miami School of Communication and other schools. He also has presented at corporate conventions including The Creativity in Business Conference in Washington, DC.
In addition, Mr. Kelly has been a regular featured speaker on creativity in journalism at media conferences, including at Columbia University, and he was selected to present a Spotlight Session at CMA13, the College Media Association's national convention in New York City. He has been a judge for the National Scholastic Press Association and both the Gold Circle and the Crown journalism awards at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the Associated Press Media Editors.
Mr. Kelly has participated in conferences including: The Idea Conference (2010), Advertising Age, New York City; Creativity in Business Conference (2011), Washington, DC; Better World By Design (2009 & 2012), RISD, Providence RI; Creativity Conference (2013), TIME/Microsoft, Washington, DC; Business Perspectives For Creative Leaders (2013), Yale University; Crash Course on Creativity (2012), Stanford University (MOOC).
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