Photo: Rebekah Flake
Working with archives, social practice, performance, video, drawing and sculpture, Dean investigates the recursive loops between the circulation of ideas, the history of colonialism, and the material reproduction of global capitalism. Operating across media and with a variety of collaborators and participants, she tries to find fault lines of failure and futurity within this seemingly closed circuit. Born in Alabama to a Nigerian father and an English mother and raised in London, she draws on this multinational background to examine how advertising, film, architecture, media, and corporate culture influence bodies, desires, politics, and everyday life. Her focus on the construction of normative consumers, idealized landscapes, racialized subjects, and scripted identities opens a critical door into the larger economic and political imaginaries shaping the world, including ideologies such as techno-feudalism and the resurgence of global fascism, seeking to connect these recent trends to the longer histories of colonialism, Indigenous resistance, environmental devastation, and working-class consciousness. Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego.
Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Spike Island, UK (2025), Mercer Union, Toronto (2024), Time Square Arts, NY (2023), ICA San Diego, CA (2023), Tate Britain, London (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2018). Other public presentations include Performa 21, NY (2021) and The Whitney Biennale in New York (2022). Group exhibitions include shows at the Contemporary Austin (2023), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018), Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2018), and the Made in L.A. Biennial at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Her work is held at prestigious collections around the world such as the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, etc.
Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Spike Island, UK (2025), Mercer Union, Toronto (2024), Time Square Arts, NY (2023), ICA San Diego, CA (2023), Tate Britain, London (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2018). Other public presentations include Performa 21, NY (2021) and The Whitney Biennale in New York (2022). Group exhibitions include shows at the Contemporary Austin (2023), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018), Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2018), and the Made in L.A. Biennial at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Her work is held at prestigious collections around the world such as the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, etc.