Andrew Kenneth Burward-Hoy was an artistic child prodigy. He is an American citizen, a New Zealand citizen, and he is also a writer.

After an emotional breakdown while attending a normal California high school, his teenage friend’s mother suggested he apply to a professional art school located on the campus of California State University Los Angeles. A school devoted to the Arts, Dance, Drama and Music. Called the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, it was there that Burward-Hoy found his wings as a professional artist, attending classes taught by teachers from the Art Center College of Design and artists from other countries.

Before graduating, Burward-Hoy began attending classes at the California Art Institute—a school that was hand-selected for him by his father, a classical musician. The California Art Institute taught intensive figure drawing and painting as it was taught at the Art Students League in New York City. During and after graduating from LACHSA, Burward-Hoy taught at this small school devoted to the motion picture arts, and in his nineteenth year, Burward-Hoy, due to a connection with a CAI alumnist, began working in motion picture advertising.

Finding the advent of computer programmes daunting to the continued pursuit of advertising, Burward-Hoy began to slowly walk away from a lucrative career to advance his artistic skills in Fine Art Painting and Sculpture. He studied as a professional copyist at the Louvre Museum with Le Bureau des Copyists, attended intensive open classes at the Atelier de la Grande Chaumière, and attended morphology lectures and classes at the Ecole Nationale Supérièure des Beaux Arts in Paris, France from 1992 to 1995. It was at the Ecole that Burward-Hoy made efforts to aggrandize his studies to include that of stone and clay sculpture, virtually for the first time, in the atelier of illustrious bronze sculptor Jean Cardot. At this time from 1992 to 1995, Burward-Hoy effectuated at least four work-study trips to Florence, Italy and one to Athens, Greece to study the works of art there.

Upon his return to the United States, using teaching as a platform for continued advancement, Burward-Hoy was partially responsible for introducing art students in Los Angeles to the teaching methods of anatomy and morphology as taught by the morphology professors at the Ecole Nationale Supérièure des Beaux Arts.

In 1995, Burward-Hoy had the good fortune to work with director Vincent Ward on his epic film What Dreams May Come. Burward-Hoy, after completing his work for the film, left the production to continue his studies in American sculpture in New York City in 1997. Although most of his images for the film were cut, the attraction of his and others’ superlative work coupled with the exemplary work produced by the special effects company garnered a sole Academy Award for the film, for Best Visual Effects.

The attraction of money continually lured Burward-Hoy back to Hollywood and motion picture and publishing illustration from this time onward. Finally leaving the profession in 2009, Burward-Hoy had amassed gold medals from the Los Angeles Society of Illustrators, had worked on four advertizing campaigns for the Peter Jackson films The Lord of the Rings and King Kong and had garnered SFSI Best of Show, Judge’s Choice and Gold:Self-Promotion awards in 1997. He left the entertainment business after having completed work on over thirty motion picture ad campaigns and countless spot campaigns during his entire career.

After a near miss at meeting the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in Palo Alto in 2005, to present the spiritual leader with a bronze portrait bust—at the invitation of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile—Burward-Hoy later donated the bust to the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery, in Woodstock, New York in 2006—at the time of His Holiness’ first official trip to the educational and monastic center at about the same time. A year after completing the bronze bust of the Dalai Lama, he completed work on a bronze portrait of famous character actor William (Bill) Newman in Los Angeles.

During a period spanning five years in New Mexico, and in particular from 2008 to 2009, Burward-Hoy augmented his list of professional accomplishments to include writing. In addition to studying on his own, he followed classes at the Stanford University Online Writers Studio with distinguished Stegner Fellows. In 2009, Burward-Hoy was accepted into the Master’s degree creative writing programme of the Vermont College of Fine Arts—this without even a Bachelor’s degree to his name.

Unable to follow the programme due to economic hardship, Burward-Hoy fought the throws of homelessness and transiency for the next ten years: in New Hampshire, North Carolina, New Zealand, Wyoming, Quebec, France, London, Georgia, New Mexico, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, Los Angeles and Virginia. However, he was able to continue with his writing during these extremely hard times, and even produced some of his most poignant work.

During this period, in Washington D.C., from 2013 to 2016, despite momentary distractions in London and Auckland, Burward-Hoy began writing social criticism and autobiographical ‘essais’ for the very first time. In 2017, and after a period of more study, Burward-Hoy embarked on his still unfinished memoir entitled The Eye of Providence in Concord, New Hampshire. The work remains unfinished. Burward-Hoy has written a list of creative works ranging from fiction, nonfiction, art, science, politics, technology, the origins and reasons for war, organised crime, social criticism, and poetry. In 2020, Burward-Hoy immigrated to the country of his birth, New Zealand amidst the tumult of the Covid-19 Crisis. Andrew Burward-Hoy is presently retired.