Dan Christiansen was born in Lexington, Nebraska in 1942. He received his BFA in 1964 from the Kansas City Art Institute and currently resides in New York City. His early work was of a minimalist geometric style which he later abandoned due to its constrictiveness. He now works as an romantic minimalist, using spray guns and squegees to create luminous canvases with absract patterns floating on top. He has won numurous awards including the National Endowment Grant in 1968 and the Guggenheim Fellowship Theodoran Award in 1969. His paintings are a part of major national and international museum collections such as the Chicago Art Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.