artists

Dean Dempsey

Dean Dempsey is a contemporary artist whose photography addresses ideas of hybridity, origin and notions of belonging by using both personal and public histories. Coming from a working-class Mexican-American family, Dean uses fragmenting and multiple composites to construct fluid narratives about perception and personhood, creating situations that aim to question our roles in social and diasporic terms. His images employ theatricality and surrealism, with himself embodying a variety of characters to restage experience through the lens of reenactment and performance.

Dean Dempsey earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute where he also served on the Board of Trustees as a student representative. His photographic light boxes have been exhibited at several national and international galleries in North America, Europe and Asia. He was the 2009-2010 recipient of En Foco’s New Work’s Photography Fellowship #13 Exhibition in New York, juried by Anne Tucker, chief curator for Photography at Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Dean was nominated for the SFMoMA’s SECA award, and has been included in over 15 reviews and publications; most notably he was featured for a cover story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2010. For an interview with him, visit: http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision/2010/08/04/photo-issue-dean-dempsey

Dean Dempsey currently lives and works in New York City. For more work samples, visit: www.deandempsey.com