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David McGovern is an artist and educator currently based in Japan. His work centres on deeply personal moments; using moving image to explore what things feel like and how things might be. He hopes his films offer our inner selves room to breathe.
David is a visiting lecturer in moving image at University of the Arts London, including Central St Martins and Chelsea School of Art and Design. He runs a variety of workshops that reimagine our relationship to film. Thinking Through Moving Image uses video-making as a tool to unblock the thought process, much like you might use a sketchbook when you are stuck. He has delivered this session in a variety of environments outside the university, including schools and studios in Nepal and Japan.
At London College of Fashion he is the head of the fashion film short course. Using both theory and practice, the course plays with the ambiguity of fashion film, encouraging the students to widen the definition rather than narrow it. He believes that fashion films should have a conscience and a purpose, even if that purpose is escapism and wonder. His expertise of the topic has led him to judge and speak at a number of fashion film festivals globally.
Previously David was Senior Video Creative at The Future Laboratory. He used his penchant for experimental film to examine and abstractly communicate the trends and shifting behaviours. He developed site-specific video installations of future scenarios that were screened across London; including Barbican’s Milton Court, Shoreditch Town Hall and the Southbank Centre. He directed work for a number of international clients including Design Hotels, Jameson and Gucci.
At present, David is artist-in-residence at Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan. He is making an experimental sci-fi short exploring memory, trauma and forgetting. He is still teaching, but due to the pandemic it has now moved online.
