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 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 water, embracing an emergent (and submergent) ethics of improvisation rooted in kinship, living processes, deep listening, play, and mutual flourishing. Their transdisciplinary, genre-fluid work brings attention to the interbeing of bodies, ecologies, temporalities, and our more-than-human kin by offering participatory experiences that invite re-membrance, shared movement, and connection through sound. Attuned to vibrational, somatic, and relational resonance, Dobbin’s practice engages the material and natural worlds as living archives, witnesses, and collaborators in learning—honouring ancestral, tidal, and cyclical rhythms as pathways to creative sovereignty—while reimagining connection and survival through shapeshifting worlds.
A committed collaborator, facilitator, and steward of creative process, Dobbin has worked with artists, Elders, youth, and communities across Turtle Island. Dobbin’s work has been shared nationally and internationally, mostly through artist-run and community-based initiatives at the intersections of art, ecology, and 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.
Photos by Meg Yoshida, Nigel Quinn, Lucas Ferguson-Sharpe, Eli Gordon.
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin gratefully acknowledges the support of:
