Sean Kelley

Sean Kelley is the Director of Public Programming and the Senior Vice President at Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP), a former American prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that is now open to the public as a museum. Kelley was the institution's first full-time employee in 1995, and has been the creative force behind all aspects of the public programming, including tours, exhibits and special events. He also supervises the program staff, exhibit design and installation, and the museum store. He is attentive to the complexity of depicting the prison's past, and encourages conversation around historic and contemporary topics such as prison brutality, rates of incarceration, stigmatization of incarcerated populations, and the questions and practices of historic preservation.

Kelley holds a B.A. from Villanova University in English. Before joining ESP in 1995, he spent four years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a Museum Educator. Kelley collaborated with Slought in organizing the 2007 symposium "Evasions of Power." He led a special tour of this historic penitentiary and provided an overview of the transformations undertaken at the museum in the name of preservation and education ("The Ruin Isn't What It Used To Be," in Evasions of Power, Slought, 2011).