Dan Annarino was born and raised in West Lafayette, Indiana where he now resides. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1974 and his MA from Purdue University in 1982.

He was employed as a graphic designer in the Department of Agricultural Communication at Purdue University until his retirement in 2016. Annarino maintains a painting studio in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, and exhibits his paintings throughout the Midwest. He states that living in the Midwest has influenced his style of painting. The landscape has a structure and at times a grid system; telephone poles, fields, rows, horizon lines, etc. He goes on to say that he tries "to dance between realism and abstraction.”

In many of his works, there are grids on the paintings that can indicate the change or passage of time. Annarino believes that things and/or places are always the same, but change through time. There are no figures in the works but there are manmade objects and 'remains'; barns, poles, houses, and roads.

Annarino's palette was influenced by fauvism, and he primarily paints with a palette knife. His paintings begin as abstract acrylics and then are built up with layers of oil to develop the landscapes. The 'holes' in his paintings add to the piece and are meant to break up the rigidness of the composition. They also represent the things that exist in the painting that you do not see; clouds, bugs, molecules, spiritual objects, and times