Stephen Dean is a French American artist based in New York City. His time-based works, installations and watercolors summon physiological and anthropological approaches to color. Often working from existing forms or events, Dean focuses on the immediacy of color and its ability to precede language and cultural codes. His contemplative and immersive works engage the chromatic spectrum as a spatial and social matter while pursuing structures, patterns and moments of chromatic intensity, in the everyday world.

A self-taught artist, Dean started exhibiting in NY at the Bronx Museum AIM program and at the Drawing Center Selection Spring in the mid 90s.

He has exhibited nationally and internationally; notable museum exhibitions include “ Drawing as practice” National Academy of Design, NY; “Art of Sport”, Copenhagen Contemporary; “Le cours des choses”, CAPC, Bordeaux; “The Beautiful Game,” Perez Museum, Miami, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; “Shock of the News,” National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; “Les Maitres du Désordre,” Musée du quai Branly, Paris; “Double Down: Two Visions of Las Vegas,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; "Living with Duchamp" at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore college, NY.

His works have been featured in the Whitney Biennial, the Seville Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the 51st Venice Biennial, SITE Santa Fe Biennial, and the Moscow Biennial.

In 2010 he was a fellow at the Villa Medici, French academy in Rome. In 2014, Rice University Public Art commissioned him a permanent installation for the Anderson Clarke Center for Continuing studies. In 2017 Dean completed a 70' permanent wall installation, titled “Crosswords” commissioned by the Percent for Art/New York City Department of Cultural Affairs for a public school in Brooklyn, NY. The following year, he received the Peter S. Reed foundation grant. His early watercolors were the subject of a monograph published by Bandini Books in 2020 titled “Morning comes without warning”. In 2022, his sculpture Prayer Mill was part of the exhibition “Odd Convergences”, curated by Jean-Hubert Martinat the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.