James D. Kelly is an Associate Professor of Journalism in the Media School at Indiana University, where he teaches photojournalism, media ethics, and healthcare reporting. During the spring of 2019 he was a Fulbright Research Scholar and Visiting Lecturer at Moi University in the Department of Communication Studies. A former newspaper photojournalist, wire service photographer and documentary filmmaker, his research examines audience perceptions of photojournalism ethics and the use of experiential learning pedagogy in journalism education.

His most recent book is, From AIDS to Population Health: How a U.S. and a Kenyan Medical School Transformed Healthcare in East Africa (Indiana University Press2022) and his recent edited book is The Handbook of Visual Communication, 2nd ed. (Routledge 2020). From AIDS to Population Health documents the 30-year collaboration between the medical schools at Moi University and Indiana University currently known as AMPATH in 100 color photos and 70,000 words of text. The Handbook is a collection of scholarly research examining all manner of visual communication phenomena. He is the former editor of Visual Communication Quarterly and sits on the boards of five research journals.

In the 1990s and 2000s, he headed five Citizen Exchanges for the US Department of State that trained working journalists in South Asia and East Africa on social issues reporting including HIV/AIDS. Since 2009, he has taken 78 IU students to Kenya and Uganda as part of his signature course, Reporting HIV/AIDS in Africa, during seven summers. The course won the Award for Excellence in Education Abroad Curriculum Design from The Forum on Education Abroad in 2018. He is a Herman Frederic Lieber Distinguished Teaching Professor at Indiana University where he received his Ph.D. in Mass Communication in 1990.