Mike Jones-Kelley

Mike grew up in Atlanta, Ga. After finishing his undergraduate degree at Georgia State University, he went to grad school in Chicago, including a brief grad turn in Washington, then back to Atlanta. In 1981, he immigrated to New Zealand and thereafter bounced back and forth between N.Z. and the U.S. for 25 years. His everyday vocabulary includes both “y’all” and “gidday.”

In his professional career, he began to be recognized as a pretty good creative and executive. Somewhere in the 1980s, he began teaching advertising at the Portfolio Center, at that time the only portfolio school in the United States. When he sold Jones-Kelley & Kilgore, he used the money to found his own school, The Creative Circus, along with his dear friend and cherished partner, Norm Grey, Hall of Fame art director and one of the most beloved men in advertising. The Circus pretty quickly became kind of world-famous. Our former students are prominent in much of the creative product of American and global advertising.

Currently, he teaches at St. Bonaventure University, in New York, in the school’s Integrated Marketing Communications graduate program. He lives in England in the summer, as he also heads the St. Bonaventure’s program at the University of Oxford.