John Killacky is a legislator in the Vermont House of Representatives serving South Burlington. As an arts administrator, he ran Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco as well as working as a philanthropic program officer for Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia and The San Francisco Foundation.

He is a lecturer, panelist, and consultant nationally and published extensively. Locally, his commentaries were heard on VPR, and published in VTDigger, Burlington Free Press The Other Paper, and other news outlets. His writing has been anthologized in Queer Dharma, Out in All Directions, Management Tools for Arts Professionals in East and Central Europe, Familiar Men, Reading Lips, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, and the Lambda Award-winning Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories that he co-edited.

His videos have been screened in festivals, museums, hospitals, and universities throughout the world. His work has been televised locally in Minneapolis, Burlington, and Houston, statewide in Vermont and Minnesota, and nationally on Free Speech TV and PBS and is in the collections of numerous libraries and universities. Champlain College hosted an exhibition, Embodied Voice: Video Narratives, featuring eight of his works in 2017. His most recent video collaboration, elegies, (2019) has been screened at Love Letters exhibition at Helen Day Art Center, Stowe, Vermont International Film Festival, Burlington, The Trickle Up, New York, Patrick's Global Cabaret, Minneapolis, Champlain College, Burlington, and Tokyo University, Japan as well as broadcast on Vermont PBS.

He curated a retrospective exhibition of Vermont photographer, Dona Ann McAdams: Performative Acts, that opened at Brattleboro Museum and Art Center and then went on to Castleton University Bank Gallery in Rutland, Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, and Helen Day Art Center in Stowe through 2020.

• John Killacky Day Proclamation from Miro Weinberger, Burlington Mayor. 2018.
• Vermont Autism Task Force Appreciation Award. 2016.
• Vermont Art Council Kannenstine Award for Arts Advocacy. 2015.
• Homer Avila DanceAble Award. 2006.
• Lambda Literary Award "Queer Crips." 2004.
• APAP Fan Taylor Award, 2004 and William Dawson Award, 1995.
• Harvard Business School Community Partnerships Scholarship. 2002.
• Acadia Summer Arts Program Residency. 2001.
• Gerbode Professional Development Fellowship. 2001.
• Dance USA's Ernie Award for contributions to the field. 2000.
• Grand Marshall Twin Cities G/L/B/T Pride Parade. 1997.
• First Bank Sally Ordway Irvine Award for Artistic Vision. 1995.

Professor Killacky stables a Shetland pony—that is trained to pull him in a cart—at a barn in Williston.