Dominic traces his passion for folk tales and legends back to the rugged beauty of the Cumbrian Mountains where he grew up. He had a love of reading old tales and a freedom to explore the mountains from an early age. The combination of wild uplands and old legends gave him a powerful sense of the relationship between land, people, story and imagination that would once have defined how we saw the natural world, each other and ourselves.

He studied at the University of Stirling before gaining a PGCE and teaching in primary and secondary schools. Traditional stories continued to attract him more strongly than other narrative forms, with their timeless and symbolic distillations of human experience, and the subconscious pull they have that isn’t easily put into words. He used these tales regularly as an imaginative springboard for learning and class discussion.

But it was on first experiencing oral performance storytelling around the turn of the Millennium that Dominic discovered what he’d been waiting to find. As entrancing as he’d found folktales on paper, it was clear they were still caged birds waiting to be allowed back into their original environment: the magical space between an oral storyteller and their audience. In storytelling performance he found an art that – as the renowned storyteller Ben Haggarty has put it – allows the genius in traditional tales to be released. In a performance, the iceberg of imaginative work and research the teller has invested in the story combine with language and pacing that respond, in the moment, to the mood of the audience; in this way a unique performance is created every time a tale is told.

Dominic committed himself to working as a storyteller, training with some of the UK's leading performers. He has been working as a full-time professional teller ever since. He gives performances and workshops in venues ranging from West End theatres to schools, museums, libraries, and conservation and heritage sites. He has performed at major festivals across the UK, including Festival at the Edge, Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts, Lakeland Storytelling Festival, Larmer Tree Festival, Sidmouth Folk Week and Whitby Folk Week. He was Storytelling Programme Director for Solfest and is currently the programming advisor for storytelling at Litfest. In early 2009 he was awarded the New Directions Commission by Cambridge Storytelling Festrival, and has sold out the Pit Theatre at The Barbican and The Soho Theatre.