Although he was born in Scotland, David Byrne was raised in Baltimore, Maryland where he briefly attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1971 after transferring from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Byrne dropped out and shifted his focus away from visual art and moved to New York to begin a career in music—he is one of the founding members and lead singer and guitarist of the famous American rock band, Talking Heads.

Byrne has been involved with photography, drawing, installations, performance and design since college and has been publishing and exhibiting his work since the 1990s. Like his music, Byrne’s use of nontraditional materials has the ability to elevate and transform ordinary elements into works that challenge what can be qualified as art. Exhibitions of Byrne’s works often incorporate text and/or audio alongside the exhibited works to create a multi-dimensional experience for the viewer. 

Recent works include the Broadway debut of David Byrne’s American Utopia (2019) as well as the forthcoming Spike Lee directed film version (2020), the start of his Reasons to be Cheerful online magazine (2019), and the solo album American Utopia (2018) Byrne established the record labels Luaka Bop (1988) and Todo Mundo (2008). Other artistic achievements include the contribution to The Last Emperor’s soundtrack to which Byrne received an Academy Award for Best Original Score and in 2004, Byrne won the Wired Award for Art for his project Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (EEEI) that used the presentation software PowerPoint as an art medium.

Byrne’s works can be found in collections including the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at institutions including Hemphill Fine Arts, Washington, DC; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, New York; Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Marino alla Scala Art Center, Milan, Italy; and Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo, Oxaca Mexico. 

Byrne lives and works in New York City.