Mr. Dawson's photographs of the American West have been recognized by a Visual Artists Fellowship from the National Endowment For the Arts, a Ruttenberg Fellowship from The Friends of Photography, a Photographer's Work Grant from the Maine Photographic Workshops, a James D. Phelan Award through the San Francisco Foundation, and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center For Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 1992, he served as a Panelist for the Visual Arts Fellowship in Photography for the National Endowment For the Arts in Washington, DC.

His first book, Robert Dawson Photographs was published by Min Gallery in Japan (1988). The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland by Robert Dawson, Steve Johnson and Gerald Haslam was published by the University of California Press (1993) and was listed as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. An exhibit sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences toured the state for three years. Portfolios of his work have been published in Aperture #120 "Beyond Wilderness" (1990) and Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (Smithsonian Institution, 1992).

His more recent work includes the Farewell, Promised Land Project with Gray Brechin. The book Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From the California Dream was published by the University of California Press (1999) in conjunction with a large exhibit at the Oakland Museum. This exhibit traveled throughout California for six years and was sponsored by the California Council For the Humanities. Another project is the Pyramid Lake Project with Peter Goin and Mary Webb. A book from this project, A Doubtful River, was published by the University of Nevada Press (2000). Dawson is founder and co-director of the Water in the West Project, a large-scale collaboration with several other photographers. His work, along with others' from the project, was published in A River Too Far: The Past and Future of the Arid West (1991) and Arid Waters: Photographs From the Water in the West Project (1992). Both were published by the University of Nevada Press. A large body of work from all the project members was collected by The Center For Creative Photography in Tucson as a permanent archive.

Mr. Dawson's photographs have been widely exhibited and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Museum of American Art, (Smithsonian Institution) Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; and the Carpenter Center For the Visual Arts at Harvard University. In 1994 The Library of Congress in Washington, DC purchased an entire set of the Pyramid Lake Project.

Mr. Dawson was born in Sacramento, California in 1950. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1972 and his M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1979. He has been an Instructor of Photography at San Jose State University since 1986 and is now an Instructor of Photography at Stanford University since 1996.

Image to the right: Favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2007

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