Jerry Katell was born in New York and educated at M.I.T. and Stanford Business School. He entered the field of real estate development as a financial analyst with the Oceanic Properties subsidiary of Castle & Cooke in Honolulu and then San Francisco. Then he became president of a new industrial development company at age 26 in Seattle as a result of a reference at a YPO meeting. He later ran a design/build construction firm in Los Angeles and then became a partner with Ray Watt. With Watt and later as Katell Properties he developed over five million square feet of industrial and office developments in southern California, did over 2000 units of condominium conversions and a major shopping center in south central Los Angeles.

He served as Board Chair of LA’s BEST for nine years, providing after-school education and enrichment programs to 28,000 of the poorest inner-city Los Angeles elementary school students. He helped build Walt Disney Concert Hall, serving on the Building Committee and Board as well as the Boards of the Music Center and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

After his wife Sharon passed away in 1999, he remade his life, studying acting for four years and appearing in movies and plays. He produced films and two musicals, one now on Broadway, Million Dollar Quartet, and another on its way, Baby it’s You. He concentrated on his hobby of photography and his show Ti Amo Italia appeared in Los Angeles and Rome. His 2011 show, The Nature of Art, with Iceland and Easter island photography, appeared in Santa Monica. He lived in Rome in 2007 and 2008 and London in 2009.

Jerry has four grown children, Andrew, Jennifer, Stacey and Pamela.