Self portrait “planet” panorama at Delicate Arch, Arches National Park. Dan Bailey, 2010
Bio
Dan Bailey’s films and animations have received numerous national and international awards, and have been included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, France. His work has been screened at the Kennedy Center, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and internationally.
In 2012, Bailey was one of four artists commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) in Raleigh, NC, and Penland School of Crafts to create Looking Up | Looking Down for the exhibition, 0 to 60: The Experience of Time Through Contemporary Art. The work Looking Down involved taking 22,000 aerial photographs of both the NCMA and Penland campuses from a helium balloon and merging them into a 9 x 18’ collage that tracked human activity on the grounds.
In 2017, Bailey received a 2-month residency at Windgrove in Tasmania, Australia, to initiate research in long duration photography of landscapes. This research project, entitled Observatories,continued with his prestigious UMBC Lipitz Professor award of 2018.
In the area of computer graphics, Bailey has recently completed two major research efforts to fully digitally re-create in 3D two early US Cities as they looked in the early 1800s: Baltimore, MD and the Capitol Hill area of Washington DC. This effort involves using contemporary GIS techniques to re-create lost terrains and landscapes. The challenge for the research is that this time period is before photography and before the US was recording and archiving records of its rapid growth. The resulting 3D models can be used for educational and scholarly research purposes in mobile apps, video games, virtual reality, augmented reality, animations, and high resolution still photographs.
Dan Bailey is currently retired and is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at UMBC and was recently Director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC) for 17 years. His teaching and research look at new intersections between animation, interactivity, photography, and time-based media.