Aria Dean is a New York-based artist, curator, and writer. Her videos, essays, installations and sculptures challenge the representational systems of race, power, and form. Born in 1993 and raised in Los Angeles by parents working in the entertainment industry, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Oberlin College. Following graduation, she returned to Los Angeles to take a position as a social media strategist for the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Dean was appointed curator of net art and digital culture for Rhizome, where she worked to preserve, present, and reperform internet native art from the 1980s to the present day.
Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, e-flux, The New Inquiry, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Spike Quarterly, Kaleidoscope Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, CURA Magazine, and November. A volume of her collected writings, Bad Infinity, was published by Sternberg Press in 2023. Dean’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on- Hudson, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
