Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka - Acadian - Irish water protector, whale listener, 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 Peskotomuhkati, 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 sea, embracing an emergent (and submergent) ethics of improvisation rooted in kinship, living processes, deep listening, play, and mutual flourishing. At the heart of their practice is the drum: a vessel of rhythm, memory, and relationship. Through this living instrument, their transdisciplinary, genre-fluid work unfolds within the interbeing of bodies, ecologies, temporalities, and beyond-human kin—offering participatory experiences that invite re-membrance, shared movement, and connection through sound. Attuned to vibrational, somatic, relational, and imaginal resonance, Dobbin’s work follows ancestral, tidal, and cyclical rhythms as pathways to creative sovereignty—co-weaving connection, care, and survival within shapeshifting worlds.
A committed collaborator, facilitator, and steward of creative process, Dobbin has worked with artists, Elders, youth, and communities across Turtle Island. Their collaborative work spans improvising music with constellations of human and beyond-human beings; designing and facilitating sound art programs for children, including those with disabilities; creating place-and-time-responsive radio transmissions; composing and sound recording for film, dance, and interdisciplinary performance; and curating community-based interdisciplinary art projects rooted in land-and-water-based pedagogy. Their practice often engages care work through collective memory, storytelling exchange, and embodied futurism, and includes ongoing sound-based research in partnership with water scientists and holders of traditional and place-based water knowledge, exploring ecological and acoustic knowledge systems. Dobbin’s work has been shared nationally and internationally, primarily through artist-run and community-based initiatives at the intersections of art, ecology, and expanded learning. They are the recipient of the Arts Nova Scotia Emerging Artist Recognition 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 shaped by intersecting identities, 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 (“everything passes”). Their practice honours lived experience as a way of coming to (un)know, while listening for the shared beingness, life, and resilience 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, offered in gratitude for the support and learnings gifted to them by the Elders, teachers, ancestors, and children in their life.
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin gratefully acknowledges the support of:
