In 1986, he began his career in photography as a photojournalist in his home town in Ventura County, at the
Thousand Oaks News Chronicle. After winning several local awards for his work, he moved to New York City, where magazine assignments came rapidly. In 1991, he moved to Los Angeles and married Kathryn Fouts, who became his photo rep and studio manager. In 1993, his son was born in Los Angeles. In 2000, while maintaining a home in LA, he moved to
Austin, Texas. There he set up a studio outside Austin in a historic building built in 1903, that had originally served as a general store, gas station and post office for nearly 100 years before he arrived. Known for the broad range of subject matter he is able to interpret, he is widely recognized for his iconic celebrity portraiture, his scientific photography, his photojournalistic stories and more recently his drawings and illustrations. He has created portraits of celebrities such as
Bono,
Neil Young,
Barack Obama,
Tupac Shakur, the
Dalai Lama,
Stephen Hawking,
Leonardo DiCaprio,
Helen Mirren,
Johnny Depp,
Kate Winslet,
Angelina Jolie,
Sandra Bullock,
Brad Pitt,
Steven Spielberg and
Al Gore. He has won over one hundred national and international awards from
American Photography,
Communication Arts, The Society of Publication Designers,
Photo District News, The Art Directors Club of New York and
Life, among others. In 1998, he was awarded the prestigious
Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Magazine Photography. In 2003, he won a 1st place
World Press Photo Award in the portrait category. In 2003, he was also honored by
Kodak as a photo "Icon" in their biographical "Legends" series. In addition to regular assignments for magazines such as
Esquire,
GQ,
Vanity Fair,
The New York Times Magazine,
The New Yorker,
New York,
Texas Monthly,
Wired,
Fortune,
Discover,
Audubon Magazine,
Details,
Premiere,
W,
Entertainment Weekly,
Rolling Stone,
Life,
Newsweek,
Time,
Vibe and many other national and international publications, his clients for print and advertising include
Nike,
Microsoft,
IBM,
LG,
Hewlett-Packard,
Sony,
Bose,
Saturn,
Sega,
Fila,
Cobra,
ABC,
Warner Brothers,
Paramount,
DreamWorks,
Columbia TriStar and
Twentieth Century Fox. Regular music clients include
RCA,
A&M,
Sony BMG,
Interscope,
Warner Bros.,
Elektra Records and
Epitaph. His work has appeared in five solo exhibitions in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. A book of his work entitled "Dan Winters: Periodical Photographs" was published in 2009 by
Aperture. In addition, he has photos in permanent collections of the
National Portrait Gallery (United States), the
Museum of Fine Art Houston, The Whitliff Collection at Texas State University and the
Harry Ransom Center for Photography in Austin, Texas. In 2012 he had a solo exhibition at the Telfair Museum/Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia entitled ''Dan Winters's AMERICA: Icons and Ingenuity
. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition and was re-released in 2014 by University of Texas Press. His book Last Launch'' which chronicles the final launches of Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis in 2011, signaling the end of an era in space travel, was released in October, 2012 by UT Press and is in its second printing. His most recent book "Road to Seeing", published by Peachpit Press, was released in January 2014 and is in its second printing. He currently lives in Austin, Los Angeles and
Savannah, Georgia with his wife and son. ==Works==