Mr. Hayes is president of the David Hayes Art Foundation and curates museum exhibitions for the work of his late father, the noted sculptor David Hayes.

He most recently ran the Argian Press, a printer of fine art books, after heading his eponymous advertising agency in Miami, Florida for seventeen years. He earned four decades of experience in advertising and public relations working on behalf of American Express, Sears, Sunbeam, Johnnie Walker, Mr. Coffee, Diagio, Homebuilders Financial Network, Oster, The French Consulate, and the Alliance Française.

He is an international specialist, previously affiliated with the Ogilvy Group’s Euramerica International. He also wrote radio commercials at Ogilvy & Mather Promotions in New York. Earlier, Mr. Hayes was the Assistant to the Chairman at the Souham Communication Group of New York, Paris, and Geneva.

On graduating from college, Mr. Hayes opened David Hayes Advertising in Manchester, Connecticut for three years before moving to New York City. While in college, he ran the Alexander Hamilton Private Press in Clinton, New York, and the Argian Press in Manchester, Connecticut. Each operation had a 9 x 12 hand-fed Chandler & Price press with hand-set lead type, where Hayes learned to appreciate fine typography.

In 1980, he hitchhiked 30,000 miles through 30 countries across three continents including nations under then Soviet dominion.

He is a graduate of Hamilton College and also studied at the Institut d’Études Politiques, the Institut Britannique and the Sorbonne in Paris, and the Parsons School in New York.

Mr. Hayes serves on the Boards of First Night Oneonta and the Catskill Choral Society where he sings in the bass section. He served on the advisory boards for NPR affiliate WUOW, the Martin-Mullen Art Gallery at SUNY Oneonta and the Coral Gables Cultural Affairs Council of Florida. He is past board member of the Foothills Performing Art Center, the France Florida Foundation for the Arts, the Greater Oneonta Historical Society, the Upper Catskill Community Council of the Arts, Executive Service Corp where he was Vice Chair and the Alliance Française in Miami. He is an Advisory Board member of the Daily Star, the newspaper of record for the New York state heartland. Mr. Hayes was invited by Mayor John Nader to help organize Oneonta’s 2008 Centennial Celebration, service for which he and every member of the Committee received Keys to the City. He is a 2012 graduate of Leadership Otsego.

He is a past commissioner on the City of Oneonta Board of Public Service and served on Main Street Oneonta’s design committee. In 2008 he was elected as an honorary member of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society by students of Hartwick College and elected an honorary member of the SUNY Oneonta chapter of Phi Sigma Iota, the International Foreign Language Honor Society. In 2012-13 he was invited to teach a class on French cinema at SUNY Oneonta.

In the past decade and a half, Hayes has organized multitudinous small-town parades featuring World War Two era tanks, roller derby women, hot air balloons, elected officials, lively critters and fire dancers.

In 2020, he was interviewed for an hour-long episode about his father for Legacy List with Matt Paxton, a program broadcast on some 200 PBS stations in 2021. His name appears in the credits of two documentaries made for French television: Elian Gonzalez and The School of Capitalism. He edited two books detailing French culture: The Other Shore and French in your Face, a French/English dictionary of slang. He is natively fluent in French, a 1977 Connecticut State Scholar and a fifteen-gallon blood donor.

He was knighted on Bastille Day of 2006 when he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite by decree of the President of France Jacques Chirac.