Ian Lloyd was born in Canada and studied photography at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and Brooks Institute in California. After working for four years as a photographer in New Zealand and Australia, in 1980 he moved to Singapore to become the managing director of the Apa Photo Agency. He formed his own company, R Ian Lloyd Productions, in 1983 and has since photographed thirty-six books about Asia and Australia. His photographs have appeared in National Geographic, Time, Fortune, Gourmet and Conde Nast Traveler and he has carried out commercial assignments for companies including ExxonMobil, Pepsi, Motorola and Singapore Airlines. In 2000 a twenty-year retrospective of his photography sponsored by the National Geographic Channel, Kodak and Canon toured six Asian cities. Two years later he initiated the STUDIO project, which gave rise to the book STUDIO: Australian Painters on the Nature of Creativity with text by John McDonald, art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. In preparation for the book and associated exhibition, Lloyd and McDonald photographed and interviewed leading artists throughout Australia. The resulting show comprised sixty-one large portraits of painters working in their studios, representing a broad cross-section of men and women working in a variety of styles across the country.
