English draughtsman, photographer and film maker. After graduating from Falmouth School of Art in 1988 she spent a year at the Supreme School of Fine Art, Athens, in 1990 before completing her studies in 1992 at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Although trained as a painter, in her early work she showed a predilection for expressive formats more often found in the cinema. Her practice of drawing took on the form of storyboards, a narrative format used in the planning of movies. Her taste for storytelling triggered many of her works, often based on the possibilities raised by chance encounter. Dean gave equal weight to fictional and historical narratives, emphasizing their power of evocation: notions of time, memory or nautical elements are part of her personal themes. In 1994, an eight-minute black-and-white 16 mm film, The Martyrdom of St Agatha, inaugurated her persistent theme of the sea. Such works are often perplexing for the viewer, as they show both a conscious and tenuous link between the fictional and the real event. Girl Stowaway (1994; see 1994 exh. cat., pp. 42–5) comprised still shots of an androgynous figure whose identity remained hidden, the title providing the only but essential clue to this.

Dean's works play poetically on the theme of searching, as well as on the blurred identities of mysterious people or things. In Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (audio recording, 1998) she and a friend embarked on the peculiar project of finding Robert Smithson's earthwork in Utah. Their precise instructions failed to find the Spiral Jetty, but more importantly the journey and its preparation (as another type of artistic document) gave clues and informed a journey that was to become an end in itself. Dean's stories embraced the notion of struggle over elements, which explain the recurrence of the sea as a major protagonist in her work. Disappearance at Sea (Cinemascope) (anamorphic 16 mm colour film, 1996; see Button, 1999) initiated a series of works based on the real story of Donald Crowhurst, who had embarked on a single-handed yacht race around the world in 1969. His boat was ultimately found abandoned. The film alluded to this disappearance in an allegorical fashion, simply showing the fading light of a lighthouse, pessimistically ending with a blank screen; the event itself is not shown. Disappearance at Sea (Voyage de Guérison) (1997; London, Frith St. Gal.) showed the same economy of means, with a rotating lighthouse-lamp acting as a sign for Crowhurst's search. Dean's minimal narratives are imbued with a sense of human failure and never-ending expectation resulting from actions that are curiously both heroic and modest. The title given to a series of seven drawings, The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days (chalkboard paint and chalk on Masonite with chalk, 2.44×2.44 m, 1997; see Button, 1999), alludes to a perilous zone on the southern Atlantic. The maritime adventures depicted were as free of interpretation as Dean's former work but the choice of medium and its storyboard aspect (with annotations or directional arrows) alluded to events in a barely descriptive manner. Some of Dean's later works are reminiscent of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher in their focus on derelict places endowed with powerful history, as in Sound Mirrors (60 mm black-and-white film, 1999; London, Frith St. Gal.). The quaint and obsolete buildings are the remains of some prototype air-raid warning structures built in 1920; by accompanying the images with ambient sound recorded in 1999, she doubles the act of preservation of those buildings, already saved from destruction in 1988. She was shortlisted for the 1998 Turner Prize.