An artist and educator for most of his professional life, Dan Brinkmeier bridges the fields of journalism and mass communication, visual art, and rural sociology. Dan works in the area of visual communication for rural development, as applied to environmental conservation and documenting the world’s biodiversity, using visual media to transfer technical or scientific information to targeted audiences (usually small villages or individual farmers) in the lowland tropics of South America. Dan has projects in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in addition to providing training for scientific staff in museums and research institutions in Cuba, Uganda, and The Democratic Republic of The Congo.

Dan studied at Iowa State University from 1981 to 1985, when he received his M.Sc. in Journalism and Mass Communication. During his years at Ames, he served as a graduate assistant with the Extension Information Service, and worked as a research assistant during the early years of the Iowa Farm Computer Study. From 1982 to 1987, he was an instructor for the Communication and Media Strategies summer course for international development workers and extension agents offered by the journalism department. After Ames, Dan returned to Peru and Bolivia, where he had done his field research for his M.Sc., and continued working on communications projects focusing upon rural communities and their use of traditional technology. He began working at The Field Museum full time in 1987, designing and building exhibits, managing educational outreach programs for Chicago schools, and finally taking on his present position ECP in 1998. From 1994 to 1996, Dan took a leave of absence from The Field Museum to teach art at Mount St. Clare College in Clinton, Iowa.

Dan’s current projects include a three-year, MacArthur Foundation-funded communication training initiative that is helping more than 30 institutions in Peru and Bolivia to develop media strategies and produce better educational materials aimed at getting rural communities involved in environmental conservation efforts. Other projects include continued support for a university-based natural history museum and community outreach programs in Pando, northern Bolivia. A new historical mapping project with the Cofán, a small indigenous group in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is helping develop a digital knowledge base and series of educational materials on Cofán culture, history, and experience.