Gary Wyatt was educated at the Alberta College of Art and the University of British Columbia, where he also interned in museum studies and Northwest Coast art at the Museum of Anthropology. He was curator of the Northwest Coast collection at the Inuit Gallery from 1987 to 1995. Since 1995 he has been a curator at the new Spirit Wrestler Gallery in Vancouver. His first book, Spirit Faces: Contemporary Masks of the Northwest Coast, was published to critical acclaim and has sold over 25,000 copies in Canada, the United States and Europe.