Born and raised in the south suburbs of Chicago, many of Dan’s photographs explore over-commercialization and the growth of an unsustainable suburban ideal. He often takes an experimental approach to image making, both in materials used and in how he conceives his work.
While earning his Bachelor’s of Fine Art degree at Columbia College Chicago, Dan began experimenting with darkroom chemistry and photo sensitive paper to create an abstract body of work, without the use of negatives, which he later dubbed Chemical Compositions. Visually, these images invoke the old masters of abstract expressionism while the process questions what exactly makes something a “photograph”.
Having learned how to use the family’s 35mm film camera at a young age, travel photography has been at the forefront of Dan’s work ever since he took his first vacation photos. Dan thrives on finding decisive moments, whether it be walking the streets of Venice at night or hiking through the Montana wilderness. His on-going documentary photo project The Dead Highway examines life along The Lincoln Highway, America’s first coast-to-coast thoroughfare. By examining affluence and poverty; beauty and ugliness; cities and farms; new and old; success and failure, a new story begins to form. It is this dichotomy that makes the Lincoln Highway, a road now considered “dead,” an intriguing subject. The project earned him an Albert P. Weisman grant from Columbia College Chicago.
In his spare time, Dan is a touring musician and member of Bev Rage & The Drinks, Diagonal, and BlackGlass just to name a few. He also loves skateboarding, soccer, and record collecting.
He currently resides in Oak Forest, IL and is the Art Gallery Coordinator for the Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery at Moraine Valley Community College.
