Dan McInnis received his BFA in Film and Photography from Ithaca College in 1992. His senior thesis was a 16mm documentary film about the life of Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ron McNair entitled “Rendez-Vous”.

He received his MFA in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995. His MFA thesis exhibition entitled “Caution-Warning-Danger” utilized the semiotics of industrial warning labels, photographic multi-media and modern iconography to confront the oppositions between fear, death, science, religion, and sexuality.

Dan taught as an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College from 1997-1999 where he continued work on digital collages involving the sociological and ethical implications of cloning and eugenics. From 2000–2003, he lived in the United Arab Emirates where he taught as an Assistant Professor of Photography for the Department of Visual Communications at The American University in Dubai. Here he began a long project photographing black and white landscapes using the minimalist work of Harry Callahan and Hiroshi Sugimoto as inspiration. This international photographic survey, entitled “Balance” was exhibited twice in Dubai, at the University of California at Berkeley (2003), at the Brooklyn Collective Art Gallery (2006) and recently at Wittenberg University’s Ann Miller Gallery.

In 2003 he moved to New York where he taught for the Department of English at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and in the Department of Photography at the School of Visual Arts. At SVA, he conducted courses in black and white craft and fashion photography. He is currently working on a new project entitled “Presence”,
a survey of formal portraits, captured using an 8x10 field camera and color film.

Other areas of interest/study:

• Hollywood Film and Its Use of Photographs as Narrative Cruxes
• Photography from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Contemporary Art in the Middle East
• Contemporary Photographic Theory
• Mass Media and Gender
• Vintage Group Photography
• History of Fashion Photography

E-mail: dmcinnis@wittenberg.edu
Website: www.danieljamesmcinnis.com