David Keith Lynch (Missoula, Montana, January 20, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer of electronic music. His artistic activity also extends to the field of painting, music, advertising, photography, and even furniture design.

A recognized admirer of Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Tati, Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog, his love for Dadaism and Surrealism is evident in some of his films, whose mysterious atmosphere mixes the everyday with the dream, sometimes escaping exhaustive understanding. of the viewer. These traits have been present since his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977). His second film, The Elephant Man (1980), was a great critical and commercial success, receiving eight Oscar nominations. His third film, Dune (1984), was not supported by critics and was a commercial failure. He next directed Blue Velvet (1986), with which he again received critical acclaim and a new Oscar nomination in the Best Director category.

Later, he teamed up with Mark Frost to create the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017), which enjoyed great popularity and unanimous support from critics, and was considered a cult series. He received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with Wild Heart (1990) His next feature film was Twin Peaks: Fire walk with me (1992), a prequel to the series. He returned with Lost Highway (1997), a psychological thriller that, although it received mixed reviews, is now considered a cult film. Subsequently, he directed what is considered his most accessible film, The Straight Story (1999), which was met with great critical acclaim. Already in the 21st century, he made Mulholland Drive (2001), a new psychological thriller with a non-linear structure, for which he received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and his third Oscar nomination for Best Director. His tenth and last feature film, which took several years of shooting using exclusively digital techniques, was Inland Empire (2006). Currently, some of his film and animation projects are only accessible through his website.

A recurring element in his films is describing the ins and outs of small communities in the United States, as is the case with Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, also feeling a predilection for the hidden secrets of the suburbs of Los Angeles, portrayed in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. The sound in his films is of great importance, and for this reason each soundtrack is worked with care. The person responsible for that sound is the composer Angelo Badalamenti, a regular collaborator of the director and creator, among others, of the well-known soundtrack of the Twin Peaks series, or of The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, both nominated for the Golden Globe. Lynch has managed to stand out according to critics as one of the few current directors with a truly personal style and an inescapable benchmark in contemporary cinema.