User:Daviddrake/David Drake (gallerist)

David Drake has over 28 years experience at senior level in the visual arts and media sector. He is currently Director of Ffotogallery, the national development agency for photography and lens-based media in Wales.

His varied career has included extensive curatorial, publishing, management and production experience for organisations as diverse as Watershed, Arts Council England, Picture This Moving Image, Public Art Online, FIVE magazine, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and HP Labs. David was Director of Visual Arts and Media at South West Arts 1992 – 2002, creating new artist development programmes and spearheading the regional arts board’s engagement with emerging technologies and wider creative industry agendas. In 1998 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel and Research Fellowship and spent six months investigating artists’ use of technology in North America and Europe.

During the 1980s he established and ran for ten years a groundbreaking media centre in London delivering industry standard photographic, television and design training programmes, in partnership with various broadcasters, cultural organisations and higher education institutions.

He was also producer of Electric Pavilion, a three year online project showcasing creativity as found within the city of Bristol, and founder of the Bristol Stories digital storytelling programme. He also produced an online presentation of the Bristol music scene called the DugOut, after the infamous nightclub.