ABOUT DAVE
Fort Mill, SC resident Dave McDonald spent the first 14 years of his professional career as a television producer/writer/director in upstate New York and received over a dozen nominations for CableAce Awards(given by the National Cable Television Association) for his work, winning 2 of them for best children’s programming. Upon moving to Charlotte, NC in 1995 he worked in the theme park industry for Paramount Parks Entertainment as head writer of the ‘Scooby Doo’ stage shows and also as a character designer/builder.

He then performed and toured for 6 years as a puppeteer throughout the Southeast with the internationally acclaimed Grey Seal Puppets.  In 2007, McDonald received a regional Emmy Award nomination for his work as a producer & writer on the television magazine series “Fingerprints” at WTVI (PBS) in Charlotte, NC.

2007 also saw McDonald parlay his television and entertainment experience into a new form of media for him - the comic book/juvenile graphic novel; where his quirky visual style and absurd humor would combine to tell unique and funny stories for young readers. His first title, The Secret Adventures of Hamster Sam: Attack of the Evil Boll Weevils!, produced in association with the Gaston County Museum of Art & History in Dallas, NC, received a bronze medal in the 2008 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards.

Today, in addition to freelance media assignments and eating Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream, McDonald works as a teaching artist; visiting schools, libraries and other venues with his “Cartooning & Making Comics” presentations, workshops and residencies. He offers a professional development workshop for educators entitled, “Bringing Cartooning, Comics & Puppetry to the Classroom”, funded initially through a grant from the NC Arts Council, and he speaks at state education conferences.

Several of his instructional cartooning videos for kids are featured on the Professor Garfield website, www.professorgarfield.org, an online learning portal created by Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis and Ball State University.  McDonald was recently an invited guest “Cartoonist in Residence” at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA.  He is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), the Southeast Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, and he is an accredited artist with the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Arts in Education program.

He doesn't normally write BIOS in third-person point of view, but this one was already written, and so he rather enjoyed the ease of cutting and pasting.