landsdowneteaparty

Robert Dannin has a doctorate in linguistics and anthropology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He taught at Brown University, New York University, and Suffolk University in Boston. He is co-founder and director of the Ddora Foundation (www.ddorafoundation.org). Among his scholarly publications Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford University Press) was the first ethnography of Islamic religious conversion in America. In 2009 he was awarded an inaugural residency at the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony.

Dannin paid for his education by working as a cook, translator, ghostwriter, and copywriter & photo editor at Sipa Press in Paris from 1978 to 1981. He was news editor for Sygma New York and later the editorial director of Magnum where he produced Sebastião Salgado Jr.’s “An Archaeology of the Industrial Age,” eventually published as Workers (Aperture). His other editorial credits include James Nachtwey’s Inferno (Phaidon) and Arms Against Fury: Magnum Photographers in Afghanistan (Powerhouse). He is the author of critical essays about photojournalism. From 1995 to 1997 he served as special consultant on photography to the office of the New York Attorney General.