David Maggs

David Maggs carries on an active career as an interdisciplinary artist and researcher focused on arts, climate change, and sustainability. A student of Jane Coop, Andre Laplante, and Marc Durand, he is the founder and pianist for Dark by Five (darkbyfive.com), has written works for the stage, and collaborated on large augmented reality and virtual reality projects (see Mummer’s Journey). David is the artistic director of the rural Canadian interarts organization Gros Morne Summer Music (gmsm.ca), and founder and co-director of the Graham Academy, a youth training academy founded in honour of his teacher and mentor, Dr. Gary Graham. He initiated and co-produced the CBC doc channel film The Country, exploring the Canadian government’s handling of indigenous identity in Newfoundland.  

As a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, David co-authored Sustainability in an Imaginary World (Routledge Press, 2020) with mentor and longtime collaborator John Robinson, exploring the relationship between art and sustainability. He is former senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, where he led work on culture and climate change. Currently he is the inaugural Innovation Fellow in residence at the Metcalf Foundation where he will explore the role of art in society, with particular focus on innovation, climate change, and cultural policy. David has been a featured speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit (Charlottetown, Banff, Montreal), The International Transdisciplinarity Conference (Leuphana), the National Valuing Nature Conference (Corner Brook), The American Association for the Advancement of Science (Vancouver), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich), Sustainability Through Art Conference (Geneva), the Narratives of Transformation conference of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (Berlin/Kyoto), and elsewhere.