David Drake is an independent writer, curator and creative producer. He has curated over 500 exhibitions, led numerous international projects and has been writer/editor of over thirty photobooks featuring work from five continents. Latterly, he has focused on photography and contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa region, curating the RANEEN festival in Muscat, Oman, in 2024, and two editions of the Shifting Sands exhibition in Madrid and Cordoba, Spain, having won the PHotoESPAÑA - Casa Arabe Nur Award in 2023.  In 2022, he was commissioned as Creative Producer for the New Narratives programme working with young creatives of British/African descent in the four UK regions, in partnership with African artists and organisations in the UK and internationally. Between 2019/21 his exhibition The Place I Call Home was presented in eleven venues in seven countries, including London, Cardiff, Derby and Edinburgh in the UK and the six Arab Gulf states. He was Director of Ffotogallery, the national photography agency in Wales, 2009-2022, during which time he led two Creative Europe transcultural projects, European Prospects and A Woman’s Work, the Wales Pavilion at Venice Biennale in 2015, and the Dreamtigers and Imagining the Nation State collaborations with Delhi Photo Festival and Chennai Photo Biennale in India. Between 2013 and 2021 he was Festival Director of five biennial editions of Diffusion: Wales International Festival of Photography.

Having established and run a media training and production centre in London during the 1980s, specialising in video, photography and graphic design, he subsequently received a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship in 1998 – investigating artists’ use of technology in Canada, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. His research report Being There: repositioning the arts for a digital future was published in March 1999. Between 2001 and 2006 he was a creative producer at Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, delivering a large-scale project Electric Pavilion: Re-Imagining the City of Bristol, selected for an artist presentation in the Interactive City section of ISEA2006, in San Jose, California.