Born in Holyoke, MA in 1946, Dana Ballard grew up in the Bahamas and had a colourful childhood before traveling to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a BSc in Aeronautics & Astronautics in 1967. This was followed by an MSc in Information & Control Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1970. He received a Ph.D. in Information Engineering at the University of California at Irvine (1974). Ballard joined the faculty in Computer Science at the University of Rochester in 1975 and subsequently at the University of Texas at Austin (2006-2022). As a teacher and supervisor Dana was famous for his sense of humour, wide ranging knowledge, creativity, and desire to give students both theoretical and applied experience.

Ballard made significant contributions to computer vision, particularly in the development of algorithms and models for visual recognition and tracking. Together with Christopher Brown in 1982, he authored the influential textbook "Computer Vision", the first of its kind. Ballard went on to make further contributions in computer vision and cognitive science, including developing theories around "predictive coding" (with Rajesh Rao) and "just-in-time visual computation" (with Mary Hayhoe). These ideas have played a crucial role in understanding how the brain processes complex information within the constraints provided by real world tasks. Dana Ballard also worked on computational models of motion control initially in robotic and computer vision and later applied to human movement. Ballard wrote two texts detailing principles of computation and information processing in human sensation and cognition entitled ‘An Introduction to Natural Computation’ (1999) and ‘Brain Computation as Hierarchical Abstraction’ (2015).