Performance and visualist John Kelly trained as a dancer with the American Ballet Theater, studied painting and drawing at Parsons The New School for Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and studied mime and voice in Europe. Kelly writes, directs, and appears in his character-driven performances in roles as varied as (most famously) Joni Mitchell and Antonin Artaud. His works are visual theater with music and often include collaborators, as in the multimedia The Escape Artist (2011) in which a man inhabits a Caravaggio painting.