Kelly Horan

Kelly Horan is The Boston Globe’s deputy editor for the Ideas section in Globe Opinion and a member of the Globe’s editorial board.

She was previously the writer and senior producer of the Globe podcast “Mr. 80 Percent,” winner of a 2021 Webby award for limited run podcast series. Prior to that, Kelly reported, wrote, and was senior producer for “Last Seen,” a 10-part podcast about the greatest unsolved art heist in history, the 1990 robbery at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. That podcast, co-produced by the Globe and WBUR, garnered more than 1 million downloads in its first week and won many year-end awards for excellence, including from the Edward R. Murrow Society, Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, the Online Journalism Association, Boston Magazine, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. “Last Seen” was named a top 10 podcast of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Stitcher, and other outlets.

Kelly was a consulting producer for a MatchLight Films/BBC4 TV documentary about the Gardner heist, which aired in July 2020. She has appeared on the History Channel’s “History’s Greatest Heists with Pierce Brosnan” and “History’s Greatest Mysteries.”

Kelly spent many years working in public radio. In 2015, she co-reported and produced a two-part investigative series, “Who Killed Gail Miles?” with reporter Bruce Gellerman. That look into the brutal unsolved slaying of a Watertown police officer won the 2016 Edward R. Murrow prize for excellence in investigative reporting.

In 2014, Kelly produced and wrote an oral history of the Boston Marathon bombing with survivors and first responders. In 2013, she researched, reported, and produced a 10-part Morning Edition series and oversaw five long-form reported stories about JFK’s presidency and legacy. Kelly also edited WBUR’s Ideas and Opinion page Cognoscenti. Prior to that, she was a senior producer of NPR’s daily live talk show, The Connection.

Kelly is the author, with Pakistani human rights activist Humaira Awais Shahid, of the book "Devotion and Defiance," published by W.W. Norton in 2013.

She was a 2007 Wellesley College Stevens Fellow in Paris and a 2004 Japan Society of New York Fellow in Japan. She speaks French and Italian and has a particular interest in reporting stories about art crime. Kelly attended L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques, or Sciences Po, in Paris, and is a graduate of Wellesley College.