Damon Tabor

ARTIST STATEMENT

I've covered different subjects as a magazine writer – gold mining, ivory trafficking, border militias, nationalist biker gangs, cartels – and tried to deeply report each story, while conveying nuance and grappling with complicated, sometimes uneasy truths.

These are some of the publications where my articles have been published: The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper's, Outside, and Men's Journal.

BIO

Damon Tabor’s work has focused on conflict, drug trafficking, black markets and the environment. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Outside, Wired, and Men’s Journal. His writing has been noted in Best American Travel Writing and his Rolling Stone article “Border of Madness” was the basis of the Academy Award-nominated 2015 documentary Cartel Land. Most recently, he produced The Trade, a five-part documentary about the heroin epidemic, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and aired on Showtime. He holds a Master’s of Science from Columbia Journalism School and is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. His forthcoming book, The Mountain in the Burning Sky (Penguin Random House), chronicles the early pioneering history of U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers—elite aerial wilderness firefighters—and their later involvement in covert CIA operations throughout the Cold War.