Who Is Lee Gass?

I am a sculptor, an educator, and a scientist.

As I described in Birth of A Sculptor, I’ve been carving since I was too young to carve, and I never stopped. Though Ivory Soap and paring knives gave way to other tools and other media and the forms I created grew more challenging and hopefully more beautiful as I developed, the feeling of what happens as I carve has remained fundamentally the same. That hasn’t changed much in 7+ decades. It is always a wonderful experience. I hope it is as wonderful for you to explore my work here in photographs, videos, slide shows, and brief descriptions. There are several ways to navigate the ouvre.

On the Stories side of the site, you can learn more about sculpting, art in general, and specific sculptures, read my thoughts on creativity, teaching and learning, nature, and other topics, and see how my careers as educator and scientist relate to my career as a sculptor. I hope you will read and reflect on those stories, share them with others, and respond to them with questions and stories of your own.

In my day job for 40 years I taught biology, beginning at the high school level, and sculpted in my free time. For 30 of those years, I was a zoology professor at the University of British Columbia. I taught introductory biology courses, upper level human ecology courses, mentored my colleagues, and was instrumental in creating several highly successful interdisciplinary undergraduate programs in science that are emulated in institutions around the world. Ultimately, I won two major national teaching awards and spent about a decade speaking to large groups of educators and consulting with institutions about how best to help people learn.

For the entire 40 years of my teaching career, I studied the ecology, territoriality, physiology, intelligence, and evolution of wild hummingbirds and collaborated with researchers around the world. Together with my research team, we lived whole summers in subalpine meadows, devised various kinds of IQ tests for free-flying hummingbirds in the laboratory, and generally had a ball investigating how nature works in the fast lane. I accumulated several lifetimes worth of stories about all these things. I hope you enjoy reading those stories as much as I’ve had remembering the events.