Dan Bailey is Director of the Imaging Research Center and Animation Professor at UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland. Professor Bailey received his M.F.A. degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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, and Museum of Modern Art, and has been broadcast on HBO and PBS. He directed 18 minutes of animation for the Minnesota Orchestra’s award-winning pilot video On the Day You Were Born and collaborated with MIT Researcher, Kent Larson, on a virtual documentary of Louis Kahn’s as-yet-unbuilt Hurva Synagogue.
His recent work in real-time interactive visualizations includes a Digital 3D puppet of George W. Bush, a visualization of Henri Matisse’s sculpture process, and a virtual tour of the Cone sisters’ collection of early 20th century art. He is currently working on a major research project of visualizing Washington, D.C. in 1790.
For the last 12 years, Bailey has been the director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC). Recognizing imaging as a process that is rooted in art and design, incorporates science and technology, and vividly describes ideas, the IRC is a recognized center for interdisciplinary collaboration among artists, researchers, industry partners, and students in creating technologically advanced media works that communicate to and resonate with the general public. The Center is dedicated to investigating new technologies and their use for interpreting and presenting content. Since its inception in 1987, artists and researchers across disciplines have collaborated in the IRC’s creative environment to develop new strategies and techniques in digital media. State-of-the-art facilities enable research in 3D visualization, immersive technologies, interactivity, installation, animation, high definition video, and sound.
Dan Bailey is also a second-generation fine art photographer and has been working with the panoramic image for most of his career. His current digital panoramas are stitched together from separate images using software. Some panoramas use as few as eight separate images; others have used more than a thousand. Once the panoramas are stitched, the computer can use different methods for mapping the image to a flat 2D image. This mapping process can give either traditional or startling, unconventional perspectives.
In 1998, Bailey received a Faculty Mentor Award from Phi Kappa Phi for teaching. In 2002, he founded the Visual Arts IRC Fellows program at UMBC, which is a unique fellowship designed to recognize, reward and encourage students who have displayed exceptional artistic talent in computer art. In special seminars, the Fellows have worked in many areas of digital art including Virtual Reality, Spherical Filmmaking, Animation, Interactive Sound, and Networked Video. They have collaborated with NASA/Goddard, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and the NYC dance company “movement/addiction.”
