David MacWilliam is an influential Canadian artist, art educator, writer and curator. For over 40 years, his broad art practice has produced exhibitions, books, essays and curatorial projects. MacWilliam was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in 1976 he completed his BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.

His early work mainly consisted of paintings featuring simple, centralized shapes on flat colour field backgrounds. Often painted on paper, they were small, fragile and hid their complexity within a somewhat casual appearance. MacWilliam came to prominence in 1990 with an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which featured work referencing the drapery found in renaissance and baroque paintings. These bolder, convincingly-rendered paintings prioritized one of painting’s foundational concerns - the figure-ground relationship.

By the late 1990s, MacWilliam shifted his painting, alluding to templates of found shapes and everyday tools, and away from art historical references and the artist’s hand. In the new millennium he continued to experiment with painting, drawing, Rorschach-like inkblots, textile work and even public art. In 2010 he was commissioned by the City of Vancouver's Public Art Program to create Kingsway Luminaires, six poles topped with illuminated globes that change colour from morning to evening.

MacWilliam’s practice is diverse; though primarily an artist, he is also a curator, writer and educator, having taught for over 40 years at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and Simon Fraser University. In 2009 he completed an MA in Visual Arts from the University of the Arts London. In 2012 he published Unfolding, a book with images of 40 of his inkblot paintings and essays by psychiatrist Dr. Jeanne Randolph and artist Robert Linsley. He co-curated Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting in 2017, and wrote an essay for the accompanying catalogue. What is most impressive about his career is the breadth of its scope - how active he has been in the art community and the respect he garnered from his peers (he has been written about by such prominent artists as Ron Terada and Ian Wallace). Through all of this he has become one of the key figures in the Vancouver art scene. He has exhibited in Canada and in Europe, including the Paris Biennale, the Galleria Panorama, Barcelona, the Musée régional de Rimouski in Québec and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy.