Born in Brooklyn, New York, David Zimbalist’s interest in music and photography began in early childhood. 

Adept at developing and printing black and white film by the time he was 10, Zimbalist became fascinated with double exposure when he discovered his grandfather’s stereoscopic camera in the family basement. 

Zimbalist graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a double major in music and psychology and attended UCLA for graduate work.

For several years, Zimbalist’s career in music eclipsed his artistic endeavors: he toured with several Broadway shows, including The Music Of Andrew Lloyd Webber; was the violist/arranger in Speakeasy String Quartet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6lyPPJKUQ), and performed on violin and viola with artists including Dave Brubeck, Joni Mitchell, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, composer Henry Mancini, Mel Torme, Ray Charles, and many others.

While living in New York in the early 2000’s, Zimbalist started taking photos again. He developed a style of reflective imagery which he nicknamed Apparition City. His goal for this first body of work was to present the reflections with minimal processing. All of the distortion and surreal quality of these images come from the reflections themselves.

Zimbalist has exhibited Apparition City images in New York, Northern California (San Francisco, Palo Alto and Santa Cruz) and Atlanta (2Rules Gallery). He has worked with several art consultants, including Soho Myriad, Posner Fine Art in Los Angeles, and Pi in Canada. His clients include Morgan Stanley (offices in San Francisco and New York)  and Alchemy Theatrical Productions in Manhattan. Zimbalist has also collaborated with Barbara Cox of the New York Times photo archive Photokunst in the development of the book Apparition City.  

In 2021, Zimbalist developed Amalgamation, a technique and style of digitally painting photographs that would form his second body of work. Storyboard Of A Dream, the first image utilizing the Amalgamation technique, took two years to complete and has an amazing backstory. Images and themes created for Storyboard Of A Dream would prove premonitory, raising a question asked by the late psychologist Rollo May: Are Artists Soothsayers? 

Storyboard Of A Dream was expanded into a book of essays and recently a full-length documentary film, which can be viewed on YouTube: https://youtu.be/a4QZkRGGyCw.

Zimbalist has also applied the Amalgamation technique to moving images, creating a series of Amalgamation Nature Loops: vividly colored looped films that calm and mesmerize, and that challenge the viewer to recognize the beauty of a planet we take for granted on a daily basis.

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