About Dennis Dimick
Dennis Dimick is an American journalist, photographer, presenter, educator, and citizen of the Anthropocene.
He served for years as executive environment editor for National Geographic magazine, and was a picture editor for the National Geographic Society for more than 35 years until retiring in December 2015. He serves in a consulting and reviewing role for the Society’s story-telling grant program.
Dennis Dimick is interested in making visual the effects on earth of humanity's expanding presence in the emerging Anthropocene epoch. This new "age of man" is marked by a rise in long-term impacts resulting from our expanding quest for resources, energy, water, and food.
He has written on these issues, and at National Geographic guided several major magazine projects on this idea: a September 2004 "Global Warning" issue on visible climate change, an April 2010 issue on freshwater scarcity, a 2011 series on world population at 7 billion, and a 2014 "Future of Food" series on global food security. He orchestrated 2014 projects on effects of coal for energy, and on long-term effects of drought and snowpack loss in the Western United States.
For five years from 2008-2012 Dimick co-organized the Aspen Environment Forum, where he presented and and moderated. He presented at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, and in 2015 moderated panels at the World Economic Forum in Dalian, China. He is regularly invited to present slide show lectures at conferences and universities on global environmental issues and environmental photography.
Dimick has been a faculty member of the Missouri Photo Workshop for 23 years, and in 2013 received the Sprague Memorial Award from the National Press Photographers Association for outstanding service to photojournalism.
His picture and environmental project editing has received many awards from Pictures of the Year International and the Society of Environmental Journalists, where he served on the board from 2016-2019. He has served as a juror for the Heinz Foundation Awards, and the Pare Lorentz Award for the International Documentary Association. Dimick is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Center of Photography.
He grew up on a sheep and hay farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and Dimick holds degrees in agriculture and agricultural journalism from Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He is available as a speaker and for photographic commission.