Robert Dannin taught linguistics and anthropology at Brown
University and New York University. He studied for his doctorate in
Paris and paid for his education by working as a cook and journalist.
That’s where he met Tony Gawron and began the collaboration that
would result in Trigger, which Dannin continued to work on and
finally completed after Gawron’s death.

Among Dannin’s scholarly publications, Black Pilgrimage to
Islam (Oxford 2002) was the first ethnography of Islamic religious
conversion in America. He was the editorial director of Magnum
Photos, where he produced Sebastião Salgado Jr.’s Workers, An
Archaeology of the Industrial Age, (Aperture 1993). His other
editorial credits include James Nachtwey’s Inferno (Phaidon 1999)
and Arms Against Fury: Magnum Photographers in Afghanistan
(Powerhouse 2002. In 2009 Dannin was an inaugural fellow at the
Norman Mailer Writers Colony.