Danielle Dean

In its West Coast premiere and as a part of the MOCA Artist Film Series organized by Anna Katz, Hemel (2024) will be screened at MOCA, followed by a conversation between myself and Cauleen Smith! June 20, 2026, 3-5pm, MOCA Grand Avenue Admission is free. Reservations are recommended but not required. Link to free tickets w/ RSVP are in my bio.

Impromptu family portrait by @pagmi , such a great artist and friend. I am proud to be in a show together @hammer_museum right now curated by the amazing @erinzulie in the crazy city of L.A that I love. #spaceistheplace #hammermuseum

HEMEL (2024) By @danielleadean screens on @criterioncollection as part of the @prismaticground curation from April. A personal essay film centring on a sci-fi B-movie shot in Hemel Hempstead about the arrival of a non-human entity infiltrating the minds of residents with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character of herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, filmmaker Danielle Dean brings together real and imagined worlds, past and present. Official Selection New York Film Festival 2024 - World premiere Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024 - European premiere @light.oracles @albertobalazs_dop @lono.world @mercerunion @thevegafoundation @spikeisland

Los Angeles | Danielle Dean is one of six artists featured in our presentation at Frieze Los Angeles. Mining imagery and language from mass culture—film and advertising to political speech—Danielle Dean examines historical and contemporary representations of labor and racialized identity. The watercolor paintings on silk, reflecting on themes of labor, industry, and class, are inspired by the artist’s grandmother, who worked as a seamstress in a department store in the artist’s hometown Hemel Hempstead, England. An example of postwar industrial towns promising a strong middle class denizenry, Hemel Hempstead provided a safe haven for families like Dean’s, but its banal planned community urban environment also espoused a disconcerting sameness, particularly for the artist who was one of few black children in town. Now Hemel Hempstead finds itself disenfranchised in a post-Brexit moment where economic precarity and fear of the unknown stoke resentment towards the marginalized and foreign. Nodding to the notion that we are in an age of technofeudalism where tech companies serve as feudal overlords, Dean juxtaposes people and architecture depicted in medieval paintings with uniformed workers (rendered in black and white and also appearing in Dean’s film Hemel) and Amazon warehouse buildings, now one of the sources of scarce jobs in town. The delicate paintings on precious silk incorporate tradition and what is often considered feminine labor. Danielle Dean, Labours of the Months: June, 2026, watercolor on silk, mahogany frame. 📸: Paul Salveson

Miami | 5:43 a.m. by Danielle Dean will be on view at Art Basel Miami Beach next week! 5.43. a.m. is a fictional watercolor landscape by Danielle Dean, composed of imagery culled from the Ford advertisement archives and the workstation of an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker. Her multi-pronged project Amazon summons fictional landscapes to explore the changing dynamics of labor, examining production, data extraction and commercial advertising. Inspired by Henry Ford’s ill-fated 1920s foray in the Amazon jungle to erect a rubber plantation company town Fordlândia, Dean traces the continuities and discontinuities between so-called Fordist labor with its emphasis on assembly-line efficiency and our current gig economy revolution as exemplified by Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Dean collaborated with AMT workers around the world over the past two years, directing them to film themselves in their own homes. The resulting body of work shines a light on the isolation of these roles, investigating the changing nature of labor and racial politics of global capital. 5:43 a.m., 2023, watercolor on paper, walnut frame 📸: Paul Salveson

📍SHORTS SHORTS SHORTS ‼️ At SFF 2025, we’ll be screening numerous selections of short and mid-length films, including ‘Fabulations, Folklores, Futures’. Norwegian folklore, dystopian futures, queer breakups, and Hemel Hempstead. This collection of films straddles the realms between reality and imagination, merging fiction and non-fiction in formally refreshing ways. Three figures from regional Norwegian folklore arise from a rural landscape, in a peculiar and playful manner roughly reminiscent of Karel Zeman and Ray Harryhausen. Elsewhere, a future world (represented by the area around the Dead Sea) has regressed to simpler ways of living, and a man must journey far to source fresh water. In present day France, a queer relationship in difficulties is captured tenderly, beautifully. And a portrait of Hemel Hempstead becomes a complex, formally bold study of race, class, and labour in an English ‘new town’, simultaneously a drama, non-fiction, and a rare instance of slow science fiction. This session will feature a Q&A with Karen Russo, chaired by festival programmer @EJRSmyth . TROLSK @Edith__Morris / 2025 / UK-Norway / 04:48 Sinkholes @karen_russo_1 / 2025 / UK / 18:45 Hemel @DanielleADean / 2024 / UK / 29:44 Heartbroken for Good @CamilleSimonBaudry / 2025 / France / 08:53 The festival takes place in London on the weekend of 20th - 21st September 2025. Tickets, and further details, are available by visiting the link in our bio! 🎟️ For those who can’t join us in person, you can also get tickets for our Online Showcase, presenting highlights of the festival and available to watch anywhere in the world! 🌍 #SlowCinema 🐞

Excited to have a solo show @storefrontnyc in late Jan as a part of their new year-long series Homelands. Looking forward to being in convo with @jessicaskwok , @josesparza , the @storefrontnyc team and artists Sertão Negro, Thandi Loewenson, @danielleadean , Sim Chi Yin, and Petrit Halilaj + Ars. After a year of showing work in far flung places it feels DAMN GOOD to exhibit work in NYC in a space less than a mile from where I lay my head to rest in Chinatown. More info to come… #Repost @storefrontnyc with @use.repost ・・・ Introducing Homelands, our new long-term research cycle and exhibition series! From now through 2026, we will delve into the political dimensions of memory—examining what is obscured or distorted in the dominant record—through the work of artists and architects who unmake and remake their connection to place. Unfolding through four exhibitions, two performances, a public program, radio series, publication, symposium, and traveling research summits, this cycle includes commissions by Sertão Negro, Alison Nguyen, Thandi Loewenson, Danielle Dean, Sim Chi Yin, and Petrit Halilaj + Ars Atelie. Homelands invites audiences to consider memory as both a tool for reclaiming space and a means of asserting or resisting power—shaping, if possible, the understanding of what it means to remember, and to be remembered. Tap the link in our bio to learn more, subscribe to our newsletter for updates on each of these exhibitions, performances, and accompanying programs. Graphic design: @EstudioHerrera

Animated this endangered Kokako bird of New Zealand (one species supposedly extinct) in a video installation piece by artist @danielleadean entitled “White” (2023). Definitely worth checking out her work — I’m always impressed with what she pulls together — it always has substance presented in an accessible way. Environment animation and compositing by @marjolainelebrasseur “The animation leads us into a speculative forest, depicting indigenous plants and trees destroyed by the clearing of land for the introduction of intensive European dairying practices. ‘White’ examines how indigenous and local knowledge crucial to the healthy maintenance of the land was disregarded and lost.” . . . . . #animation #animator #2danimation #2danimator #stopframeanimation #animate #celanimation #photoshopanimation #aftereffects

OLD STORIES IN A NEW TOWN: DANIELLE DEAN’S PORTRAIT OF HEMEL HEMPSTEAD AT SPIKE ISLAND In an exhibition spread across various spaces of Bristol’s Spike Island, Danielle Dean creates a playful & particular portrait of Hemel Hempstead. Previously the setting for sci-fi film Quatermass II, Will Jennings finds that Dean pulls together historical & imaginary narratives from the New Town to create an exploration of place & those who live there. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00256-Danielle-Dean-at-Spike-Island Link in bio ----- Childhood memories can be unreliable. The softness of a young mind, and its willingness to absorb the real and the imagined, the possible and the supernatural, can leave unsure memories as it hardens up and seeks to recall events of decades prior. Places, too, can hold such memories, acting as containers for actual and assumed pasts, becoming stage sets for the everyday dramas of existence as well as stories written into them that stick to their sense identity and meaning. Danielle Dean is an artist based in Los Angeles – a place more than any other shaped around unreal narratives and assimilated stories – but grew up in the seemingly more humdrum and parochial setting of Hemel Hempstead. A New Town born from post-war utopian ideals that imagined a new future for society, architecture, health, and education, Hemel is one of many British New Towns considered as architectural artefact, often romantically or nostalgically in a time where housing and development has been handed by the state to the free market. However, it was (and still is) a place of habitation, residence, and the domestic drama of families, work, and recreation. ----- @Spikeisland @danielleadean @willjennings80

OLD STORIES IN A NEW TOWN: DANIELLE DEAN’S PORTRAIT OF HEMEL HEMPSTEAD AT SPIKE ISLAND In an exhibition spread across various spaces of Bristol’s Spike Island, Danielle Dean creates a playful & particular portrait of Hemel Hempstead. Previously the setting for sci-fi film Quatermass II, Will Jennings finds that Dean pulls together historical & imaginary narratives from the New Town to create an exploration of place & those who live there. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00256-Danielle-Dean-at-Spike-Island Link in bio ----- Childhood memories can be unreliable. The softness of a young mind, and its willingness to absorb the real and the imagined, the possible and the supernatural, can leave unsure memories as it hardens up and seeks to recall events of decades prior. Places, too, can hold such memories, acting as containers for actual and assumed pasts, becoming stage sets for the everyday dramas of existence as well as stories written into them that stick to their sense identity and meaning. Danielle Dean is an artist based in Los Angeles – a place more than any other shaped around unreal narratives and assimilated stories – but grew up in the seemingly more humdrum and parochial setting of Hemel Hempstead. A New Town born from post-war utopian ideals that imagined a new future for society, architecture, health, and education, Hemel is one of many British New Towns considered as architectural artefact, often romantically or nostalgically in a time where housing and development has been handed by the state to the free market. However, it was (and still is) a place of habitation, residence, and the domestic drama of families, work, and recreation. ----- @Spikeisland @danielleadean @willjennings80

“I am obsessed with the entanglement of truth and fiction. This fascination may have started without my awareness as child in the UK, watching a lot of American television and imagining what my birthplace was like. Or it could have begun when I was looking at an archive of adverts in Life magazine, and noticed sayings, gestures, and ways of life that I recognized in my everyday life. As an art student I wondered: How does racial capitalism survive so well?” Hit the link in bio to read “Enemy from Space” by @danielleadean from 349 Winter 2024-25 Danielle Dean’s solo exhibition “This could all be yours” is on view at @spikeisland until May 11, 2025. #DanielleDean #Letterfromthecity #FlashArt349 #FlashArtMagazine

Los Angeles | We’re returning to Frieze with works by Carolina Caycedo, Danielle Dean, Gala Porras-Kim, Jesse Chun, and Suki Seokyeong Kang. Booth A01 February 20-23, 2025 Inspired by the artist’s grandmother, who worked as a seamstress in a department store in Hemel Hempstead, the embroidered watercolor paintings on silk reflect on themes of labor, industry, and class. Dean learned to sew from her grandmother, a skill deeply tied to the expectations of Hemel Hempstead’s postwar generation—where children were often expected to grow up and work in the town’s factories and offices. Over the decades, the town has been home to several major companies, including Amazon one of the most recent additions—which served as the model for the ‘Corporation’ featured in the film. Nodding to the notion that we are in an age of technofeudalism where tech companies serve as feudal overlords, Dean juxtaposes people and architecture depicted in medieval paintings with uniformed workers from her film (rendered in black and white) and Amazon warehouse buildings. The intricate embroidery on precious, delicate silk incorporates tradition and what is often considered feminine labor, as well as an element of repetitive movements often entailed in factory work. Danielle Dean, Double Glazed Window, 2025, watercolor and silk thread embroidery on silk. 📸: Paul Salveson