Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka - Acadian - Irish water protector, drummer, musician, artist, storyteller, educator, and lifelong learner who gratefully lives and creates within Wabanaki. Born in Kenepekachiachk—a tidal tributary of Wolastoq (“the beautiful river”)—their practice follows the highest (and lowest) tides in the world, within the unceded and unsurrendered lands of L’nuk, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkatiyik, Bay of Fundy.

Dobbin’s relational and place-responsive practice is guided by curiosity rather than form—the way of water. They are committed to creative paths that honour the ever-changing thresholds between land and water, embracing an emergent ethics of improvisation rooted in kinship, living processes, deep listening, play, and mutual flourishing. Their transdisciplinary, genre-fluid practice brings attention to the natural world as witness, teacher, and collaborator in learning—inviting re-membrance, shared movement, and connection through sound.

An active collaborator and facilitator, Dobbin has co-created with artists, Elders, children and communities on projects across Turtle Island—particularly those engaging Indigenous, Queer, Environmental, Disability and Healing justice lineages through land-and-water-based pedagogy. Their work has been shared nationally and internationally, primarily through artist-run and community-based initiatives at the intersections of art, education, and ecology. They are the recipient of the Arts Nova Scotia Emerging Artist Award (2019) and the Canada Council for the Arts’ Robert Fleming Prize (2022), awarded annually to an emerging composer in Canada.

As a human being with intersecting identities and an ongoing practice of decolonization and disableism, Dobbin is invested in (re)connection, (ex)change, renewal, and worlding projects that uphold respectful relations, embrace interstitiality, and embody the spirit and responsibilities of Peace and Friendship, as well as Tout passe. Their practice honours lived experience as a way of coming to (un)know, while listening for the shared beingness, life, and resilience found in meeting waters. Often found alongside animals and plants as well as within the waters of gender expansion, Dobbin is grateful for the (tr)ancestral and plantcestral sanctuaries and lineages of (more-than-)human beings who hold them within a vast web of expression. Their practice is a gesture of reciprocity, sharing the support and learnings that have been poured into them by the Elders, teachers, ancestors and children in their life.