Daniel Ward (b. 1991) is an artist and writer. Working across film, photography and installation, his work explores themes such as commitment, failure and belonging, in relation to wider histories of politics and image-making. At the centre of his work is an examination of the effects and aftereffects of capitalism, Empire and consumerism, and how such forces organise everyday life.

His work often brings together political histories, personal anecdote and archival material, using them in different combinations and intensities. Through experimenting with different techniques and materials, his films often digress from their main subject associatively and poetically, allowing the work to become open-ended rather than strictly didactic. This method of filmmaking resembles the documentary in its form, yet images are juxtaposed and repeated, while sounds are digitally processed from field recordings and found samples.

Ward’s practice also reflects on the way photographic and filmed images are constructed, and the uses to which such images are put. His work is informed by his writing on art and film history, which focuses mostly on histories of experimental, collective and political forms of art-making in the 20th century. His writing has been published in Artforum, Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and New Left Review: Sidecar, amongst others. He is currently a PhD candidate at University College London, writing on 20th century British art, politics and film.

He is currently developing a trilogy of films (the first of which is "Lonesome Ghosts" (2025) first exhibited at Peer Gallery, London), exploring the relationship between memory, state violence and visual representation. The next film in this series, provisionally titled “Weapons”, is currently in production and takes Operation Legacy as its starting point—an official state policy to destroy evidence concerning British colonial violence—and the origins of the documentary.