Where do I start? I’m Mike, a writer and photographer that grew up happily in Sarasota, Florida, where they taught us to outrun alligators as kids. In 1938, my grandfather fled Vienna on a train. Near the border, the Schutzstaffel boarded, and my grandfather climbed out a window before vanishing into the woods. Once the train continued, he noticed another man hiding. He introduced himself, and the two hiked west together before splitting up. My grandfather swam across the Rhine into a refugee camp where he was sent to the Dominican Republic. Years passed before he returned to Vienna where he married and made a life. Eighteen years later, an alimony letter revealed a daughter he’d hid from his family. My grandmother divorced him and moved to South Africa. A new hemisphere was necessary. My mother followed, met my father, and they moved to New York. Many years later, my grandfather reconnected with the man from the woods, and he took my parents to visit him in South Florida. They fell under the subtropics’s spell and moved there. That was how I developed such an affection for alligators.

Then in 2015, two weeks after I buried my father in South Africa, I quit my job and moved to Vienna. As I tried to make sense of that loss, I was asked by an editor to write, and very clumsily, I started to teach myself. The next year, my stepfather survived a severe brain injury in a grisly car accident. The accident recast our lives. That summer though, I wrote a story about the author of White Trash Cooking for The Bitter Southerner. It was a story about belonging, a love letter to the South, about what happened to men who died of AIDS here, and it won a James Beard Award for profile writing. By then, I’d started writing and making photographs for the New York Times about the concentration of psychics in my hometown, the history of surfing in Rockaway Beach. I worked on investigative stories about natural gas moratoriums as well as Tennessee William’s little-known paintings. I left New York and spent months in New Orleans after my first Krewe du Vieux parade, at the Key West Literary Seminar’s residency, and returned to Vienna. Finally, I moved home to be near my family.

In Florida, I wrote about the cultural legacy of our sugar industry for Rolling Stone, about disappearing waves for the Times, and went into the woods with migrant workers to discover a vast, illicit market for palmetto berries for the Guardian. In the wake of Hurricane Idalia, I heard about flamingo sightings, so I went looking at a nude beach naturally. Surprisingly, what I found was how the bird so central to our identity vanished from Florida only to return a century later in a hurricane for The New Yorker. Last year, I wrote about the mysterious tradition of worm grunting for The Oxford American, watching Audrey and Gary Revell lure worms out of the ground with a wooden stake and slab of steel as they have for fifty-five years to earn a living. It was beyond moving that Susan Orlean included it in the Best American Science and Nature Writing. I recognized how curiosity and grief shaped my life and led me to begin writing. Now, I’m writing a book about how my stepfather’s brain injury reshaped our family lives, and how his harrowing recovery put us in contact with a haunting form of magic. This past fall, I opened a solo show at David Castillo in Miami, What Was, What Wasn’t, a body of photographs that wove together my personal history with the spellbinding myths that belong to Florida. Besides working, I spend most of my time gardening, surfing, and pushing a boat around the backcountry looking for tarpon. Most days, I’m at the beach with my sweet dog, Georgia, and whenever somebody visits, I demand we visit a demented fish camp or watch the sunrise. 

michaeladno@gmail.com
(941) 726-4752

My writing is represented by Janis Donnaud, and my photographs are represented by David Castillo.

Full CV available here

Select Editorial and Commercial Clients

The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Guardian, The Surfer’s Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, Emocean, The Atavist, Aperture, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, The Oxford American, The Boston Globe, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal, Southern Living, The Miami Herald, National Geographic, Outside, NBC, Curbed, Flamingo, Monster Children, Camera Austria, Void, Wax, Cultured, Boston, SRQ, PACKET, Hyperallergic, Wildsam Field Guides, Noah, YETI, Autre, Christie’s Auction House, Art Basel, Artsy, Indoek, AT&T, Guernica, At Large

Best American Science and Nature Writing, Edited by Susan Orlean and Series Editor Jaime Green, 2025

Green Eyeshade Award for Environmental Reporting, 2025

Green Eyeshade Award for Light Feature Reporting, 2025

Sunshine State Award for Serious Feature Reporting, State and National, 2025

Sunshine State Award for Light Feature Reporting, Local & Community, 2025

Economic Hardship Reporting Project Grant with Rolling Stone, 2025

Environmental Journalism Program, National Tropical Botanical Garden, 2024

Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts Grant, 2024

Economic Hardship Reporting Project Grant with Oxford American, 2024

Art Writer’s Grant Finalist, Andy Warhol Foundation, 2023

Green Eyeshade Award for Business Reporting, 2021

Key West Literary Seminar Residency, 2020, 2019, 2018

Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowship, 2020, 2016

James Beard Award for Profile, 2019

Research Fellowship, University of Florida, 2019

Writer’s Room Residency, The Betsy Hotel, 2019

Culture Builds Florida Grant, Division of Cultural Affairs, Dept. of State, 2019

Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Finalist, 2017

Puffin Foundation Grant for Photography, 2016

John Ringling Towers Fellowship, 2015

Keyholder Residency, Lower Eastside Printshop, 2015

Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Fellowship, 2015, 2014

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency, 2015

Vermont Studio Center Residency, 2014