Brian B. Kelly’s first years were spent in Ohio farm country, but by the age of twelve he settled in suburban Maryland and attended public school there. Kelly joined the civil rights movement on the Hiser theater picket line in Bethesda, Maryland, in the spring 1960. That September, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy to graduate in 1962. He began studying at Harvard College that fall. During summers and in time off from college, Kelly worked as a laborer on Boston high-rise construction projects as a member of South Boston’s local 223 of the Hod Carriers and Common Laborers Union of North America. In December of 1963, he signed a refusal to fight in Vietnam, and became increasingly active in the collegiate anti-war movement.

Kelly graduated from Harvard with honors in English in 1967 and began writing for the Boston Avatar then co-founded the Boston Free Press in 1968. Late in 1970, he co-founded and soon became president of The Corners of the Mouth, Inc. which opened the first organic restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts and subsequently the first organic bakery and the first organic food store there. In December 1972, Kelly was granted US utility patent #3,705,556 for one of his unique furniture assembly designs.

In February 1975, Kelly moved to New York City to take a job with Time-Life’s hotel cable TV division where he soon became Director of Operations. He stayed with the company which became Spectradyne, Inc. until he formed National Video Industries, Inc. late in 1976. NVI became the leading independent teleproduction facility in Manhattan during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, producing progressive video and television projects while doing commercial work for such clients as The Miss America Pageant and Pepsi Cola.

In 1990, Kelly made his first trip to Russia and quickly became a consultant in the formation of Russia’s second major television network, Channel Russia, working with the Russian Radio and Television Company under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin. In 1991, he co-founded Video International in Moscow which is today one of the most successful media companies in the Russian Federation. Working in television in Moscow in the 1990’s, Kelly was involved in producing Russian beauty pageants and popular Russian TV shows including Stars of America, Stars of World Screen and Vladimir Posner’s America. In 1993, he co-founded International Broadcasting and Communications, Inc., a consulting firm employed by both former Soviet companies making the transition to capitalism and by American firms such as Hughes Corporation interested in doing business in Russia. Thus Brian B. Kelly has been familiar with Russia for nearly three decades through friends, family and business. Though maintaining a Moscow residence since the early 1990s, he spends most of his time in Bushwick, Brooklyn, working on new writing and video projects: Commie Spy! and The Soviet Patriot From Brooklyn, both based on the life of Joel Barr, a close friend and associate of Julius Rosenberg who was also a Soviet collaborator and who, unlike Rosenberg, escaped the FBI to spend forty years in the USSR under a new name and KGB legend—becoming personally acquainted with Nikita Khrushchev and joining the highest levels of Soviet technical and scientific endeavors. Kelly became personally acquainted with Barr in 1991. Kelly is also working on several video productions about Timothy Leary and related matters from his large archive of such material.

Kelly has published five novels so far: Tropic of Paradise, a Tahitian Love Story, 2010, based on his experiences in Tahiti in 1962; The Irish Smuggler, 2013; Just Call Me Whitey, 2016; Our American, A Romance of Moscow, 2017 and Mother Russia, 2017.