He was born on 12 January 1930 in Gniezno. His father, Tomasz Kamiński, was an officer in the Polish Army in active service, and his mother’s name was Stefania Wawszczak. In 1936, he began attending primary school and graduated in 1943 in Cieklin, near Gorlice, where he and his parents had been resettled shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. A year earlier, Tomasz had been arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz.

In 1945, after the end of the war and his father’s return from the concentration camp, young Włodzimierz began his studies at the Saletyn Fathers’ secondary school in Dębowiec. Two years later, he and his family moved to Szczecin, where he continued his general education and began studying music and violin. After graduating from high school, he began studying musicology at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Poznan under Prof. Adolf Chybiński, who developed in him an interest and passion for the study of music and musical instruments. After Prof. Chybiński’s decease in 1952, he continued his studies under the supervision of Dr. Maria Szczepańska. In 1954, Włodzimierz Kamiński wrote his master’s thesis Works of foreign composers in Polish manuscripts of the 15th century and received his master’s degree. At the same time, from 1951 he worked at the Department of Musical Instruments of the National Museum in Poznań. In 1962 he obtained his doctoral degree by writing a dissertation Main Problems of the Formation and Development of Musical Instrumentation in the Polish Lands. This dissertation was published in 1971 by the National Music Publishing House (PWM) under the title Musical instruments on Polish lands.

At the age of 32 he took up the post of a curator of the Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznań and remained in this position until his resignation in 1991. As a curator, he wanted the instruments not only to remain as exhibits, but also to be played. Therefore, in 1960 he founded the ensemble Collegium Musicorum Posnaniensium, of which he was the artistic director. In the meantime, he began to learn violin making under the supervision of Kazimierz Bendowski, a builder and conservator of string instruments at the museum. In 1959, he was accepted as a theoretical member of the Association of Polish Artists Violin Makers, and then as a practising member after presenting instruments he made himself. In 1964 he was elected president of the Association. During his presidency, he fought to put the creative rights of luthiers on a par with those of members of other creative associations. Like most of the professor’s ideas, these aspirations were successful and, from 1981, members of the association became members of the Union of Polish Artists Violin Makers with full creative rights. Kaminski remained president of the ZPAL until the end of his life, 9 April 1993.

Włodzimierz Kamiński was a unique character, open to all kinds of novelties. He was creative and young in spirit to the end of his life. A treasury of many ideas, he inspired others to develop, was socially active, taught and conducted research. From a young age, music was his passion not only in theoretical terms, but also in practical terms – after all, he played the violin. Unfortunately, paralysing stage fright during public performances caused him to move away from performing music to building violins, researching their origins, and creating structures in Poland for the professional study of violin making. With the help, experience, and support of the outstanding violinist Professor Jadwiga Kaliszewska, he led to the establishment of a violin making class at the Mieczysław Karłowicz Secondary Music School in Poznań in 1973. Professor Kamiński developed an original curriculum for teaching violin making, on which he wrote: “There should be a violin making school with an artistic profile, whose curriculum would take into account all aspects of the art of violin making. One of the basic aspects of such a programme should be the striving to provide a general musical education to young luthiers, without which it is difficult to imagine an effective creative activity in this art field”.

However, the professor’s aspirations did not end there. In 1979, in the structures of the then Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music, the Violin Making Section was established, which became part of the Department of String Instruments. Thus, the assumption that the study of violin making should provide opportunities for direct contact between a violin maker and a musician materialised. The author’s programme assumed that students of violin making would follow a general musical programme, obligatory for all students of the Instrumental Faculty, as well as professional subjects related to the construction of string instruments together with classes of a string instrument.

Professor Kamiński was one of the first to teach violin making and the history of violin making at the Secondary Music School and the Academy of Music in Poznan. He was also a lecturer in musicology studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he gave lectures on the history of musical instruments, taught introduction to instrumentology, and conducted master’s seminars. He also aimed to widely popularise violin making and instrumentological knowledge through radio interviews, television programmes, museum exhibitions, press articles and, of course, books. In 1972 the National Music Publishing House published the book Violin Making, which was written by Kamiński and Józef Świrek. This position can be described as a textbook for students of violin making, on which generations of Polish violin makers have been brought up. His next book, Polish Violin, published in Kraków in 1982, is the first illustrated album in which the author describes the history of violins that have stylistic features of the Polish violin making school. In the early 1980s, Kaminski also initiated the creation of a bulletin of the Union of Polish Artists Violin Makers, which was published once a year from 1983 to 1986.

He was a jury member of international violin making competitions in Cremona, Moscow, Hradec Kralove, and Sofia, among others. Since 1972, he served as chairman of the jury of the Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Making Competition and the Zdzisław Szulc National Violin Making Competition, which he also initiated. He was decorated with numerous state orders, medals, badges, and departmental and regional awards.