Frieda Dean, printmaker, performance artist, painter, sculptor and teacher, was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1950. When she was a child her family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee where she attended public schools and the University of Tennessee. Her college studies continued at Augusta College in 1976. From 1976 to 1979 she studied painting and sculpture privately with Freeman Schoolcraft, a Chicago sculptor who had retired to Augusta. Her major works from this period were watercolors, both figurative nude studies and experimental abstracted landscapes. These works were featured in her solo exhibition in 1979 at the Lyle Galley in Augusta.

Dean lived in Ithaca, New York from 1980 to 1984 and it was during these years that she focused on performance art and sculpture; she had a solo exhibition of oil paintings and sculptural masks at the Flowers Gallery, Duke University in 1981. Dean moved to Chicago in 1988 and in October of that year she participated in a performance piece with J.S.G. Boggs at the Art Institute of Chicago. A 1992 national tour of her performance piece "Hat Gallery" included stops at numerous venues including the Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Cincinnati Art Museum. National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" featured an interview with Dean wearing her "gallery" during the Hirschorn show. In 1996 Dean joined the Chicago Printmaker's Collaborative, an experimental print workshop. Collagraphs and monotypes created there were exhibited in her solo shows at the Lang Gallery, McHenry County College, Chicago in January 1997 and the ADC Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York in October 1999. Those prints featured various combinations of organic forms (such as leaves, vine tendrils, and dried seaweed), fabrics, hair, and antique wooden letterpress forms. In 1998 Dean relocated to New York City where she studied lithography with Judith Solodkin at the School of Visual Arts.

In 2000 Dean was invited to join Krishna Reddy's Color Print Atelier at NYU where she produced a body of color viscosity prints whose imagery is based on organic or blown-ink forms. During this period her work began to show the influence of her study of American Abstract Expressionist paintings and prints. After the tragedy of September 11^th, Ms. Dean left her lower Manhattan apartment and studio to return to Augusta, Georgia. She is currently teaching painting and printmaking at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta. Her recent prints include large-scaled abstract lithographs and intimate color engravings. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including "Art and Narrative" (September 1996, Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, Chicago), "New Abstract Prints in Chicago" (April 1999, Fine Arts Center, Chicago), and "Providence Art Club Juried Prints and Drawings Exhibition" (March 2002, Providence, Rhode Island).