Our team is passionate about bringing art to the community.

Bob Devin Jones

Bob Devin Jones, a native of Los Angeles, has been a theatre worker for over forty years. He began as an actor performing in Shakespeare Festivals, including Oregon, Berkeley, Illinois, Idaho, and in St. Petersburg – American Stage’s Shakespeare in the Park.

A graduate of Loyola Marymount University, he also attended the American Conservatory in San Francisco as well as a one year tutorial at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England. For the past twenty, he has worked in the theatre primarily as a playwright and as a director.

He has been a resident of St. Petersburg since 1997, participating in many educational and cultural organizations. These include Academy Prep, City of St. Petersburg Arts Advisory Committee, Pinellas County Cultural Affairs Task Force, and the Florida Humanities Council. He currently serves on the board of Florida Craft Art, Friends of the Jack Kerouac House, the Palms of Pasadena and he sits on the Public Arts Commission for the City of St. Petersburg. Bob is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Bank of America’s Hero Award in 2005, Weekly Planet’s Best of the Bay 2001 Directing and 2002 Playwright, Theatre Communication Group (TCG) Artist Collaborative Los Angeles Cultural Affairs, and Florida Humanities Grants, and most recently the Tampa Bay Lightning Community Hero in 2018.

His most recent published work is Prometheus Standing, part of an anthology by Dr. Gary Lemons. Outside of his work at The Studio@620, Bob has recently performed at USF St. Petersburg’s theatre week. He also collaborates with the St. Petersburg Shakespeare Festival on “Shakespeare in the City,” currently in its third year. Bob has a cottage cookie company called Bob’s Cookies.

David Ellis (deceased)

Dave graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Industrial Design. In the early 1970’s, Dave and a friend started their own business, Designers Consortium, Ltd. He developed a long consulting relationship with the Smithsonian Institution which resulted in the design of the Milestones of Flight Hall, the premier Hall of the Air and Space Museum for it’s opening in 1976. He was also asked by the American History Museum to design the Hall of Electricity.

After a number of years Dave started G. David Ellis and Associates, Inc. and continued to work in the exhibition and product design fields. Some of his new clients included the Library of Congress, The African American Museum of History and Culture in Philadelphia, PA, the Government of Haiti, and as principal design consultant on two major exhibitions for the Royal Commission, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Next, he became a founding partner in Hands On! Inc, whose mission was to create highly educational interactive exhibitions and museums for all ages. They came to St. Petersburg in 1986 and created Great Explorations, the Hands On! Museum, opening in November of 1987. They decided to apply what they had learned as the managers of a successful museum and left Great Explorations in 1991 to return to consulting.