Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker, writer, and lecturer in the film studies department at King’s College London.

Mann's films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals, including the Berlinale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, DOC NYC, the Hong Kong Film Festival, Documenta Madrid, DocLisboa, Visions du Réel, and the ICA in London.

Mann is the author of Occupying Habits: Media as Warfare in Israel\Palestine (Bloomsbury, 2023), as well as several essays and peer-reviewed articles. His forthcoming book, titled Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier (forthcoming with UC Press, 2026), explores the neocolonial economy of desert film locations and the material politics that connect cinema and hyper-arid lands.

Mann has held positions as a lecturer and Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department at King’s College London, and received his PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture and the Media Department at Goldsmiths College, London. He was also a filmmaker in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, 2022-2024.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Nonfiction
• Media and Environment
• Cinema and Geography
• Film Materiality

Teaching

Daniel Mann teaches modules on documentary film, experimental film, practice-based research, and filmmaking.

Expertise and public engagement

Daniel Mann has shown his films in various top film festivals and has won awards. In 2024, Mann's film received the Jury Prize for an International Film for his film "Under a Blue Sun".

In 2025, his new film in development was selected to be part of the Rotterdam Film Festival's Cinemart.

Selected publications

• Desert Mirages: Finding Common Grounds between Erasure and Overexposure, In Media Fields. Issue 18, 2024.
• Duelling in the Sand: Cinema against the Desert. In Storied Deserts. Ed. Aidan Tynan and Celina Osuna, 2024.
• Occupying Habits: Everyday Media and Warfare in Israel-Palestine (Bloomsbury Press, 2023)
• Red Planets: Cinema, desert and extraction. Afterimage Journal. UC Press. March 2022.
• Rambo in the Dead Lands: Cinema, War and Landscape. Screen Journal. Oxford Press 2021.
• I am Spartacus: Individualising Visual Media and Warfare. Media, Culture & Society. Jan, 2019.