Daniel Elias

Vocation

Family

American contemporary art dealer and host of PBS’s popular "Antiques Road Show" since January 2001, Elias is married to Karen Keane, CEO of Skinner, Inc., who introduced him to the position. He was perfect for the job, she told a journalist, "because he likes to talk." Elias owns Elias Fine Art in Allston and did not know antiques, had no experience on TV, and isn’t an appraiser. Still, he impressed the producers with his intelligence, his attractiveness, and his inquisitiveness. His wife has been on the show since its inception in the mid-90s. In his early career in music and theater, he toured with the Boston rock band Human Sexual Response, and met his wife, a fan, in the early 80s. He founded Boston’s New Ehrlich Theater but made the transition to fine art. Elias attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and then went to work for a gallery. He operates a business publishing fine art prints, and, in 1997, he opened Elias Fine Art in Allston, MA. He and his wife live in an old farmhouse in an affluent suburb of Boston, where they manage to reconcile his taste in contemporary art with hers in antiques; they have two sons.