Lee Beavington
Dr. Lee Beavington has been a Peter Gabriel fan since he was nine. He works in eco-social justice, and is a biologist, storyteller, university instructor, and creative artist.
The song i/o aptly aligns with his work and worldview of the interconnection of life.
Lee has won awards for his teaching, research, writing, photography, and museum curation. They all focus on the power of nature in our lives, as does his TEDx Talk.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is his passion. He has taught zoology through dance, philosophy through poetry, and ecology through watercolour. A recipient of the 2025 West Coast Teaching Excellence Award, he has inspired students in climate justice, nature-based education, and taken them to the Amazon River (some of which appears in his i/o video).
A lifelong Peter Gabriel fan, he recently wrote a tribute article for Gabriel’s OVO album to coincide with its 25th anniversary.
Lee lives with his family on a small island in the Pacific Northwest named SḴŦAḴ (Mayne Island) near Vancouver, Canada. He feels it important to acknowledge all of his teachers and mentors—human and other-than-human—for inspiring his work. You will find him reflecting in the forest, mesmerized by ferns, and always following the river.
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ARTIST: Peter Gabriel
CREATOR: Lee Beavington
SONG: i/o (Dark-Side Mix)FROM i/o
ARTIST: Peter Gabriel
CREATOR: Lee Beavington
SONG: i/o (Dark-Side Mix)FROM i/o
Video info:
“I Run like Water”
Water is a shapeshifter. This video moves in and out with the tide and rides along the veins of the Earth. As an ecologist, poet and philosopher, I bring these lenses to i/o’s theme of interconnection. Through the science of relationships, I follow the symbiotic threads from moon to water to mouth to cell to planet.
I titled this video “I Run like Water” after the i/o lyric. We begin on the shore. The intertidal is the zone of in-betweens, home to barnacle, anemone, and urchin. Like humans, each inputs and outputs in their own way. We evolved from the ocean and are born from water.
On the theme of in/out, my video moves in and out of the real world, of the river, and of the eyestalks of a banana slug. We move from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from planets to chloroplasts. Watch a cell become a city and sunlight dance with water.
In an ecological sense, everyone is reincarnated as earth, rivers, and trees. Life cycles and shapeshifts, and water is a frequent sculptor of the animate and inanimate. Our mortality helps us discern the illusion of separation. This video is a reminder that we are defined by, and utterly dependent upon, our relations with other life.
“I Run like Water” is a true collaboration of human, nature, and AI—or human and artificial nature. This video often blurs the line between the natural and artificial. When is the artist human, and when is it algorithm? The keen eye will also spot two blue moons, Jupiter’s Io, and even a hint of Peter’s famed flower mask. All the video footage is my own, mostly taken on SḴŦAḴ / Mayne Island, in rivers and shores throughout the Pacific Northwest, and in the Amazon.
This video starts and ends with sun glitter, which holds a fascination difficult to capture in words. These shimmers on the waves embody a vital link between sun and earth, water and light. A Buddhist nun once told me her vision of god: sunlight sparkling on the ocean. Each glitter, born from sunlight one million years old, holds the spark of life.
Song info:
i/o is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Dark-Side Mix, by Tchad Blake.
Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.
Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.