David Keith Lynch was born on January 20, 1946. He was reared in Missoula, Montana, by a middle-class family.¹⁾

Lynch spent his youth traveling throughout the United States before studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he initially began creating short films.²⁾

He relocated to Los Angeles, where he created his debut feature film, Eraserhead, a surrealist horror thriller (1977).³⁾

After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight cinema circuit, Lynch was hired to create The Elephant Man (1980), a biographical picture about a deformed man named Joseph Merrick, from which he garnered mainstream recognition.⁴⁾

He was then hired by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group and went on to make two films: the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which was a critical and economic disaster, and Blue Velvet (1986), a neo-noir crime drama that was highly lauded.⁵⁾

In the same decade, Lynch developed his own television series, the popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017), with Mark Frost: he also made a cinematic prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992); a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990); and a family picture, The Straight Story (1999).⁶⁾

His foray into surrealism filmmaking began with three films that used “dream logic” and non-linear narrative structures: the psychological thriller Lost Highway (1997), the neo-noir mystery film Mulholland Drive (2001), and the mystery film Inland Empire (2006).⁷⁾

Simultaneously, Lynch embraced the Internet as a medium, creating a number of web-based projects such as the animated DumbLand (2002) and the weird sitcom Rabbits (2002).⁸⁾

Lynch possesses a variety of skills. He has worked as a singer-songwriter, releasing two solo albums, Crazy Clown Time (2011) and The Big Dream (2013).⁹⁾

Lynch worked with his fellow Virginia Eagle Scouts on his 15th birthday, placing VIPs in the bleachers outside the White House during John F. Kennedy's inauguration.¹⁰⁾

The David Lynch Foundation, which he established to finance Transcendental Meditation education in schools.¹¹⁾

David Lynch is a painter and photographer. He first trained as a painter.¹²⁾

He is the author of two books, Images (1994) and Catching the Big Fish (2006), as well as the director of various music videos and advertisements.¹³⁾

Lynch wrote and drew The Angriest Dog in the World, among other things, from 1983 until 1992.¹⁴⁾

One of the primary motifs that reviewers saw in Lynch's work was the use of dreams and dreamlike imagery and structure, which they linked to the “surrealist ethos” of depending “on the subconscious to generate visual impetus”.¹⁵⁾