Grace P. Rhoades Dean, née Grace Pinkney Rhoades, painter, printmaker, and teacher, was born to George and Zara Pinkney Rhoades in Cleveland, Ohio on January 15, 1878. She studied with Keyon Cox at the Cleveland School of Art and with Arthur Wesley Dow at Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1901. She married fellow artist James Ernest Dean (1871–1933) on June 29, 1908. They sailed to Germany in 1910 where they studied in Munich until 1914 when they returned to the United States and moved to Hiram, Ohio. By 1917, they had moved to Toledo, Ohio. She was an art teacher at the Toledo Museum of Art between the years 1917 and 1925, and she later taught art at the Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo.

Dean was a member of and exhibited with the National Association of Women Artists, Women's Art Club of Cleveland, the Society of Independent Artists, the Ohio Water Color Society, the Toledo Society of Women Artists, and the Toledo Federation of Art Societies. She also served as president of the Ohio Water Color Society. She was included in the Annual Water Color Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1922 and the 4^th International Water Color Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924. Dean garnered numerous awards for her work.

The work of Grace P. Rhoades Dean is included in the permanent collections of the Indiana Museum of Art, Indianapolis; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; and the University Art Collection, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Grace Rhoades Dean died in Toledo, Ohio on 30 July 1968.