David Maggs carries on an active career as an interdisciplinary artist and researcher focused on arts, climate change, and sustainability. He is the founder and pianist for Dark by Five, has written works for the stage, and created augmented reality and virtual reality projects which have been included in the UK’s Future of Live Performance Spotlight Gallery. David is the artistic director of the rural Canadian interarts organization Camber Arts. 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.
Following the publication of Art and the World After This, David became the inaugural Fellow on Art and Society at the Metcalf Foundation. In collaboration with the UK Innovation Foundation NESTA, he co-authored Impact Investing in the Cultural and Creative Sectors: Insights from an emerging field, a report on groundbreaking work on impact investing in cultural and creative industries. David has been a featured speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit, The International Transdisciplinarity Conference (Leuphana), The American Association for the Advancement of Science (Vancouver), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich), the International Association for Analytical Psychology (Berlin), The Arts of Living with Nature (Kyoto), and is the upcoming keynote speaker at the International Society of Music Educators this July in Helsinki.
The great transition currently underway from an extractive society to a regenerative society is most commonly framed in economic, technological and political terms. As significant efforts across these fields struggle to fully activate the transformation, can the arts…