Doug Matthews

After twenty-two years in the Canadian Armed Forces serving as an aeronautical engineer, Doug Matthews began his second career in the entertainment industry when he joined Pacific Show Productions, located in Vancouver, Canada, in 1985. This company produced special events and entertainment in Canada and overseas for many diverse clients. For example, these included: original musical theater productions in Barkerville, BC; the millennium First Night celebrations in Vancouver, BC; the annual Leo Awards for BC film and television; and four entertainment show tours for the Canadian Armed Forces to the Arctic, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Egypt, and Israel. Pacific Show Productions was regularly nominated for special event awards both in Canada and the United States and won several under Matthews's leadership. The company was sold in 2004.

Matthews is also an accomplished speaker, delivering seminars at special event conventions and courses at universities in the areas of entertainment, creativity, and event production management. He remains involved in the industry as a member of the advisory board of an international consortium of special event production companies called TEAM Net, based in Atlanta, Georgia, an organization of which he was president for 2002-04.

Matthews has been writing since he was in the air force. His first book was a self-published work on special events, How to Create Fantasies and Win Accolades: A Practical Guide to Planning Special Events, which received critical acclaim in the USA and Canada. Another two books on event production entitled Special Event Production, Part One: The Process and Special Event Production, Part Two: The Resources were published by Elsevier in 2008. Updated second editions were published in 2015 by Routledge and are currently marketed around the English-speaking world. He has also recently published a book of stories and anecdotes of his time in the special events industry entitled Stumbling Toward Applause: Misadventures in Entertainment. He continues to write magazine, online, and newspaper articles relating to special events and other topics, with many appearing in magazines circulating internationally. To date, he has published over twenty, in addition to other creative writing endeavours such as scripts, company newsletters, and mini-plays. His last passion, photography, has resulted in a number of published works and awards.