Biography
Devon Brady is an artist, designer, musician, paramedic, and firefighter. Beginning his creative life as a drummer in Tampa's 1980's punk scene, Devon studied sculpture and photography at the University of South Florida and went on to work in the scenic arts, producing props, scenery, and environments for the entertainment and hospitality industries. Having founded LiveWork Studios in 2011 along with his wife, Janine Awai, and long-term collaborator, Michael Lemieux, the three partners work together to produce everything from installation art to custom furniture and interiors.
In addition to - or alongside - his creative endeavors, Devon is a nineteen-year veteran firefighter and paramedic in Hillsborough County, Florida. Working 24-hour shifts, he spends every third day at the fire station and divides the rest of his time between his family and his home studio in Seminole Heights.
Devon is a founding member and CEO of Crab Devil, a Tampa-based multi-media art collective that celebrates and elevates Florida’s culture and phenomena. The members of Crab Devil are currently hard at work developing The Peninsularium, a multi-year, multi-artist, multi-million-dollar effort to provide Tampa with its first and only permanent, immersive arts installation experience.
““Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total world revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that writing of all books, writing the books of all possible authors.
If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”