David Ryan is a visual artist and writer also actively involved in contemporary music. He studied at Liverpool and Lanchester (Coventry) Polytechnics, and also on a travelling German Scholarship to Hamburg, Lubeck and Berlin. He has been Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He has written on contemporary art for various journals such as Art Monthly, Artpress (Paris), Artreview, Contemporary Visual Arts, Modern Painters, Art papers (USA), and on music for Tempo, and Dissonanz (Switzerland). Exhibitions have included Crossing Abstraction 1 (2009, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin), After Image, (2013 Emerson Gallery, Berlin) and Crossing Abstraction 2 (2012, Kunsthaus Erfurt and Forum Konkrete Kunst, Erfurt). In 2015 he curated a large-scale exhibition Drawing Towards Sound looking at the relationship between drawing and musical notation at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, and has also curated At the Point of Gesture (2013 Turps Gallery/ 2015 Wimbledon Space). Recent exhibitions have included June Mostra, (2016 British School at Rome) In Nomine Lucis (2017 Santa Maria Della Scala Museum, Siena), Ex-Roma, (2017 APT Gallery), Granular (2018 University of Greenwich) and Imagining Architecture (2018 IsdaT, Toulouse and at Hors Les Murs, Marseille) co-curated with Benet Spencer. He also showed a large scale installation of painting at APT Gallery (Undersides of Practice) in 2020 and also at the Museo Civico, Pescia, Italy (2023). His work in music has been featured in numerous Festivals, including a featured video collaboration in the Venice Biennale (2015), as well as numerous book chapters, including ‘Energy Fields: Earle Brown and the Visual Arts’ in Earle Brown: Beyond Notation (University of Michigan Press 2017) and ‘Drawing Towards Sound’ in the Wiley Companion to Contemporary Drawing (Wiley-Blackwell New York 2020). He has also worked with numerous composers including Michael Parsons, Earle Brown, Catherine Lamb, Christian Wolff, Phill Niblock, Nicola Sani and Christophe Guiraud, and with many musicians including Anton Lukoszevieze, John Edwards, John Tilbury, Ian Mitchell, Gianni Trovalusci amongst others. In 2015 he curated a large-scale exhibition looking at the relationship between drawing and musical notation at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich. Ryan has also performed and broadcast for Danish Radio, UNAM Mexico, BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM, Glasgow CCA, Radio Slovenjia, Sky Italia Classica TV, and numerous Festivals, including Sonic Illuminations, British Film Institute, London (2009); and Namusica (2013/14), Naples, Italy. He has recently participated the AngelicA Festival, Bologna (2016). Screenings of his video works have taken place at Konzerthaus, Berlin; Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire; Issue Project Space, New York; Darmstadt Ferienkurse for Neue Musik, and Qo2 in Brussels, Belgium. He has collaborated with various ensembles performing works by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, and has been involved in premieres of pieces by Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Ennio Morricone (Cadenza, 2003, Multipla, 2009), and Phill Niblock, amongst many others. Recent compositions include Provisional Piano Pieces (2018 -) and Recitativo/Clouds and Noise – Fragments after Lucretius and Negri (2015-18). In 2016 he was an Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome, and in 2021 a recipient of the Shelagh Cluett Trust Award.