Sean Kelley has run all public programming at Eastern State Penitentiary since 1995, when he was hired as the organization’s first full-time employee. He produced the site’s award-winning audio tour in 2002, now heard by more than a million visitors. During his tenure he has overseen the selection of, and curated, nearly 100 site-specific artist installations.
Mr. Kelley is currently focused on developing programming to address the enormous growth in the US prison population since 1970, and the causes for racial disparities within that population. In 2014 he oversaw the development of a 16-foot, 3,500 lb bar graph on the penitentiary’s baseball diamond. The Big Graph illustrates the skyrocketing size of the U.S. prison population in the past 40 years, the racial breakdown of the prison population over time, and the comparison to other nations’ prison populations. The exhibit won awards of excellence from the American Alliance of Museums, the American Association for State and Local History and the PA Federation of Museums. He is now overseeing development of a companion exhibit, Prisons in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which will serve as a place of reflection and dialogue.
