David Walsh received an MA in Chemistry at Oxford University in 1974. His fascination with film led him to joining the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 1975, where he undertook a project to study the decomposition of cellulose nitrate film. From this starting point he became heavily involved in all aspects of the work of the IWM Film and Video Archive, becoming Head of Preservation in the 1990s. With IWM’s growing reliance on digital technology, he found himself increasingly acting as the bridge between the technical and the curatorial, and was appointed Head of Digital Collections in 2012, working particularly on IWM’s strategy for digitisation and digital preservation, but still acting as the main repository of film preservation knowledge.

Internationally he is known for his writings and presentations on many film archive matters, frequently examining the hard facts underpinning many common assumptions about film and digitisation. He joined the Technical Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 2006 and served as its head from 2011 to 2016.

Since 2016 he has been the Training and Outreach Coordinator for FIAF, taking a lead role in defining and implementing FIAF’s training initiatives around the world, and offering assistance and advice to those seeking to preserve their film collections, large and small. With the increasingly perilous state of audiovisual materials in all parts of the globe, the need to save what remains of the audiovisual heritage of many countries has become a matter of urgency, and this has become one of his main concerns.