Before coming to Fuller he served as professor and president at New College Berkeley (1982–1990), professor and acting dean at Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology and program director and co-founder of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church Culture.
He is also a senior fellow at USC's Center for Religion and Civic Culture (since 2000)[2] and consulting editor for Christianity Today(1996 to present).
[failed verification] His books Modern Art and the Life of a Culture (with Jonathan Anderson) and Insider Jesus won a 2017 Christianity Today award of merit.
His numerous publications can be characterized as an attempt to grapple with "the dramatic encounter between faith and human culture.
"[4] Dyrness's 1971 book on the twentieth-century French Catholic painter Georges Rouault influenced an entire generation of Christian visual artists.