David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, visual artist, and musician. He has received critical acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities.

Lynch studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film was Eraserhead (1977), which saw success as a midnight movie. He received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001). His film Wild at Heart (1990) earned the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or. Other notable films include Dune (1984), Lost Highway (1997), and Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Mark Frost created the ABC series Twin Peaks (1990–1991), and Lynch co-wrote and directed its film prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and the limited series Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). He also portrayed Gordon Cole in the Twin Peaks projects. In 2024, Lynch said that, due to the likelihood that COVID would exacerbate his emphysema, he could no longer direct in person, but said he would continue working on other projects as able, and later released a statement in which he said that he was in good health otherwise and not retiring.

Lynch's other artistic endeavors include his work as a musician, encompassing the studio albums BlueBOB (2001), Crazy Clown Time (2011), and The Big Dream (2013) as well as painting and photography. He has written the books Images (1994), Catching the Big Fish (2006), and Room to Dream (2018). He has also directed several music videos for artists such as Chris Isaak, X Japan, Moby, Interpol, Nine Inch Nails, and Donovan, and commercials for Calvin Klein, Dior, L'Oreal, Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, and the New York City Department of Sanitation. A practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM), he founded the David Lynch Foundation, which seeks to fund the teaching of TM in schools and has since widened its scope to other at-risk populations, including the homeless, veterans, and refugees in 2005.

Lynch has received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2006 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2019. In 2007, a panel of critics convened by The Guardian announced that "after all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era."