David Louis Puttick
School founder
“When I’m not at Catalyst, you’ll usually find me thinking about Catalyst.” While our whole team feels a close bond to our school, it is with founder David Louis Puttick that the feeling runs the deepest. From 1998, he was a director of the original dBs Music in the UK, when they built the first studio, literally, from the ground up. David started researching the dBs Berlin (now Catalyst) project in 2011 – and the rest is history.
Considering himself European, first, and English, second, the family man works between Berlin and a Cornish beach. Wherever he is, he’s always on hand to do anything needed to keep the show on the road. The former musician, songwriter and sound engineer established our Berlin centre “to create a space where creative minds could be inspired to grow their own greatness and make a huge impact on the world.”
David says that one of the things that most excites him in life is “the ability of human beings to overcome horrendous obstacles and still be capable of creating moments of great beauty. The film Life is Beautiful comes to mind.” His favourite art pieces are Giacometti’s Walking Man sculpture and Rothko’s series of maroon paintings. Map of a Human Heart is his film of choice. But when it comes to the music he loves, there is, quite unsurprisingly, “way too much to mention!”