Summary: Zero-shot learning for visual recognition, e.g., object and action recognition, has recently attracted a lot of attention. However, it still remains challenging in bridging the semantic gap between visual features and their underlying semantics and transferring knowledge to semantic categories unseen during learning. Unlike most of the existing zero-shot visual recognition methods, we propose a stagewise bidirectional latent embedding framework of two subsequent learning stages for zero-shot visual recognition. In the bottom-up stage, a latent embedding space is first created by exploring the topological and labeling information underlying training data of known classes via a proper supervised subspace learning algorithm and the latent embedding of training data are used to form landmarks that guide embedding semantics underlying unseen classes into this learned latent space. In the top-down stage, semantic representations of unseen-class labels in a given label vocabulary are then embedded to the same latent space to preserve the semantic relatedness between all different classes via our proposed semi-supervised Sammon mapping with the guidance of landmarks. Thus, the resultant latent embedding space allows for predicting the label of a test instance with a simple nearest-neighbor rule. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have conducted extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets in object and action recognition, i.e., AwA, CUB-200-2011, UCF101 and HMDB51. The experimental results under comparative studies demonstrate that our proposed approach yields the state-of-the-art performance under inductive and transductive settings.