Daniel R. Small (USA, 1984) is an American contemporary artist, filmmaker, anthropologist, educator, and author based in Los Angeles, California. His work engages with speculative pasts and futures through interventions in sites, narratives, and technologies, by considering material histories, exchanges, and relationships. He has also engaged with organizations such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Forensic Architecture, UNESCO, and others, working alongside these institutions to set up various thought experiments or interventions within pre-existing research systems or archives.
His installations, films, and interventions have been featured at institutions and galleries such as the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, California), Institut d'Art Contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (Lyon, France), The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation (Stockholm, Sweden), Match Gallery at Museum of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Sculpture Center (Long Island City, New York), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japan), and Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (East Lansing, Michigan). He has received numerous awards, including the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award (2015), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award (2016), Teaching Advancement Award at ArtCenter College of Design (2019), Department of Cultural Affairs Los Angeles Award (2020), Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award (2021), and the LACMA Art+Technology Lab Fellowship (2022). He is currently working on a film that follows the process of revising the Voyager Golden Record as an interstellar archive of humans and life on Earth.
