John Killacky

Killacky died at his home on Monday, 2 November 2026, aged 74. His husband, Larry Connolly, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. Doctors had first suspected kidney stones after an examination in late 2025, and in February 2026 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which he wrote about publicly that summer. He continued to work, and his assemblage Metastasis, about his illness, was shown at Burlington's South End Art Hop in September 2026.

His death was reported by Seven Days and the Burlington Free Press. He is survived by his husband and by four siblings, Kit Barbaro, Jean Killacky, Tom Killacky and Bill Killacky, and their families. His family asked that donations in his memory go to the Merrymac Farm Sanctuary in Charlotte, Vermont.

John Raymond Killacky was born on 24 June 1952 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Rita E. and John L. Killacky and the third of five children. He grew up in a lower middle class, Irish Catholic family on the city's South Side; his father and both grandfathers worked at the Chicago stockyards. At about the age of ten he saw the Alvin Ailey dance company on a school trip and announced at dinner that he wanted to be a modern dancer, and his mother enrolled him in dance class. He knew he was gay in high school.

After dancing with Chicago Moving Company he won a scholarship to Harkness Ballet and moved to New York City at 20. New York's 1973 gay pride parade fell on his 21st birthday, and as a cast member of the play Coming Out! he was introduced onstage in Washington Square Park, an experience he later described as finding his community. He shifted to modern dance after workshops with Meredith Monk and toured with Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers. In 1979 he travelled to the Himalayas to study with a Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

Back in New York he moved into arts administration, managing the dance companies of Laura Dean and Trisha Brown. He was general manager of the PepsiCo Summerfare festival in Purchase, New York, for two years and senior program officer for the arts at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia for two years.

From 1988 to 1996 he was curator of performing arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he presented more than 5,000 artists, including members of the so called NEA Four. In 1994 he presented Ron Athey's Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, a performance about suffering and redemption amid the AIDS pandemic that became the focus of congressional debate over the National Endowment for the Arts budget. He received hate mail and threats, and Senator Jesse Helms attacked the work on the Senate floor. Killacky argued that freedom of expression was a more precious commodity than taste.

He then spent six years as executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and seven years as program officer for arts and culture at the San Francisco Foundation. In 2010 he became executive director of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont, succeeding its founding director Andrea Rogers. Over eight years he grew the budget from 6 million to 7.7 million dollars and nearly doubled the endowment to 11 million dollars, partnered with social service agencies to offer discounted tickets, raised about 30,000 dollars a year for class scholarships, introduced sensory friendly shows and promoted other presenters under the banner One Flynn.

After retiring from the Flynn in 2018 he served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives for South Burlington, sitting on the Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs. He was lead sponsor of the 2021 resolution apologising for state sanctioned eugenics, and the law creating the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission began in his committee. He also visited and listened to the women held at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in his district.

Throughout, he taught and wrote on the arts and cultural policy, leading workshops in Bratislava, Buenos Aires, Salzburg, Sofia, Toronto and Warsaw and teaching at the University of Minnesota, Drexel University and Champlain College. His films and intermedia installations, including Stolen Shadows, Crip Shots and Dreaming Awake, were shown internationally and are held in many collections.

In 1996, shortly before leaving the Walker, Killacky had surgery for a tumour in his spinal cord and woke paralysed from the neck down. A former dancer and marathon runner, he used a mirror in rehabilitation to teach himself to stand and walked again after three months, but he never fully recovered and used a cane or wheelchair for the rest of his life. He said a Shetland pony named Pacific Raindrop, which pulled him in a cart, let him dance and run again.

He lost many friends to AIDS, writing that his notebooks listed 119 of them, and he channelled that grief into film. He was married to Larry Connolly, a retired editor, educator, actor and director, with whom he made several videos. With Bob Guter he coedited the 2003 anthology Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and in 2021 he published because art: Commentary, Critique, and Conversation.

Killacky is remembered as one of the most outspoken defenders of artistic freedom during the American culture wars of the 1990s and as a leader who made performing arts venues more open to people with disabilities, low incomes and neurodivergent conditions. His friend and collaborator, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, called him the fiercest advocate for all things good for the arts. Former colleagues in the Vermont House remembered him as gentle and soft spoken except when people's rights or access were at stake. His own art, from his AIDS era films to his late work on disability and illness, set out, in his words, to make the body sacred again.