Dylan McGarry is a scholar, activist-pracademic, and multimedia artist working across disciplines and scales. He holds a transdisciplinary PhD in Environmental Education from the Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC) at Rhodes University, South Africa, with an informal split-site affiliation with the Social Sculpture Research Unit (SSRU) at Oxford Brookes University.

His early career moved between Fine Arts, performance, and biology, driven by a deep desire to work with animals and respond to escalating global ecological crises. This led him to train as a zoologist and marine biologist, and later as an environmental scientist. Over time, he recognised that meaningful change required a focus on socio-cultural transformation. Storytelling became a central tool in this work, with his practice spanning visual art, theatre, social sculpture, and other hybrid forms. Through these, he explores how “suitably strange” creative practices can reshape inner worlds and, in turn, influence broader social and ecological realities.

He now operates within a dynamic nexus that bridges research and creative practice, contributing to fields including educational sociology, ecological economics, anthropology, social learning, and social and environmental justice. He is currently co-director of the One Ocean Hub, a global research network focused on transformative governance, and continues to develop Empatheatre—a theatre-based approach to transgressive social learning and an extra-legal pathway toward more democratic policy change. His academic work spans sustainable rural development, environmental justice, ecological citizenship, and practice-based arts research.

At the core of his creative practice is a focus on empathy. He works with imagination, listening, and attentiveness as sculptural materials, exploring their potential to foster deeper forms of connection and learning. His expertise lies in developing pedagogies of empathy within the context of ecological citizenship, investigating how these intangible qualities can shape both personal and collective transformation. He is also the founder of the Institute of Uncanny Justness, a collaborative platform dedicated to exploring the role of experimental creative practice in reimagining learning, activism, and justice.