Born in Calgary (1963), Donald Lawrence has a BFA from the University of Victoria (1986), an MFA from York University (1988) and teaches in the Visual Arts program at Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops, BC. Through such bodies of work as The Beach (1985), Romantic Commodities (1993), The Sled (1995), and Torhamvan/Ferryland (2005), Lawrence uses combinations of photography, sculpture, drawing, and installation to explore the meeting place of urban and wilderness culture. Several on-water projects – the Underwater Pinhole Photography Project (since 1997), Kepler’s Klepper (2011) and the Coastal Cameras Obscura (since 2014) – connect Lawrence’s interests in sea kayaking and the ocean environment to a long-standing fascination with early and pre-photographic optical apparatuses. Lawrence is the recipient of research grants from the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), including as lead artist/researcher of The Camera Obscura Project (SSHRC) that saw an international group of artists and scholars realize the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival in Dawson City, YK (2015) with the ODD Gallery, followed by gallery-based exhibitions as well as publication of Art, Research, Play: The Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Project (2021) and the creation of the permanent Nanton Camera Obscura (2019) with the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. A monograph, Donald Lawrence: Casting the Eye Adrift (2023) is a recent publication with the Kamloops Art Gallery, following a retrospective exhibition at the gallery in 2020.