[1] Born on the Lower East Side of New York City, his family relocated to Los Angeles when Jonathan was nine years old.
[3] Kellerman was born in New York City, son of David, an aerospace engineer and inventor, and Sylvia, a dancer and office manager.
As a college senior, he co-wrote an unpublished novel that garnered a Samuel Goldwyn writing award.
That prize has served as a stepping stone to film writing for other writers, but Kellerman deliberately avoided the world of screenwriting and enrolled in a PhD program in clinical psychology at USC.
His doctoral research was on attribution of blame for childhood psychopathology, and he published a scientific paper on that topic, his first, at the age of 22.