Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, U.S.A., and brought up in a suburb of London in the U.K., Danielle’s work draws from this multi-national background in her interdisciplinary practice.
Her work explores the colonialism of mind and body—the interpellation of thoughts, feelings and social relations by power structures working through news, advertising, political speech, and digital media. She focuses on the processes of construction of race, gender, age and class that are generated through target-marketing practices, commodifying subjectivities. She is interested in subverting such processes, to both understand and shift them toward a non-essentialized space of being, blurring fiction and reality.
Danielle studied Fine Art at Central St Martins in London and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She has been a Whitney Independent Study Program Fellow in New York City and a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Solo exhibitions include Hexafluorosilicic and PTL (Part Time Lover) at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; and Confessions on a Dance Floor, The Bindery Projects, Minnesota. Group shows include Made in L.A. 2014, The Hammer Museum; Demolition Woman, Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange County; and Auto Italia South East, London. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Rema Hort Foundation, and most recently a Visual Art Award from Creative Capital, 2015.
Dean is currently Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.