Dana Gordon began his art career working as assistant to Tony Smith and George Sugarman in the late 1960s in New York. He had studied painting at Brown University and Hunter College, and photography with Aaron Siskind in Chicago..
In the 1970s Gordon was a Professor of Art at the Universities of Michigan, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, and a lecturer at the Honolulu Museum of Art, St. Martins, and other venues. In 1979, he returned to New York, where he has lived ever since.
Gordon’s first New York solo show of painting was at the Ericson Gallery in 1982. He then had multiple solo shows at such galleries as Andre Zarre and 55 Mercer in Manhattan and Sideshow in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, plus other galleries including Galerie Metanoia in Paris, France, and a retrospective at the Westbeth Gallery in NY in 2019.
From 1968 to 1979, Gordon made avant-garde films in addition to painting. These were shown internationally in festivals and solo shows such as at MoMA, Anthology, the Walker, and at EXPRMNTL-5 in Knokke in 1974, and other venues more recently.
Gordon’s work is in many public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, M.I.T., Adelphi University, and the Royal Belgian Film Archive, and of Edward Albee, Virgil Thomson, and Hilton Kramer. His art received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Rauschenberg’s Change Foundation, and university research grants, and residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Triangle Workshop. In 1978 he was the “runner-up” for the NEA’s United States/United Kingdom Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship.