Dr Daniel Mann is a Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. His work in writing and filmmaking examines the infrastructures underlying audio-visual media in the context of colonialism, armed conflict, and climate emergency. He is the author of Occupying Habits: Media as Warfare in Israel\Palestine (Bloomsbury, 2023), as well as several essays and peer-reviewed articles. His current book project explores the neocolonial economy of desert film locations and the material politics connecting cinema and hyper-arid lands.

His feature films have been exhibited internationally at film festivals and venues such as the Berlinale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinema du Reel, the Hong Kong Film Festival, Visions du Réel, and the ICA in London. Mann’s most recent film, Under a Blue Sun, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Competition, Centre Pompidou, the ICA, and received the Best International Film award at Documenta Madrid 2024.

Mann 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, King’s College London, and received his PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture and the media department at Goldsmiths College, London.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

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

Teaching

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

Expertise and Public Engagement

Daniel Mann regularly participates in panels at film festivals and has organised screening events and interdisciplinary conferences. In 2024, Mann organised the conference Arid Visibilities to explore the visual politics of desert spaces. The conference combined film screenings with public talks.

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.