an independent artist/animator, began his career early. At the age of 3, Dean's mother gave him a pencil and pad of paper to keep him quiet, and he's been making noise with his art ever since. He grew up in suburban Chicago, saturated in a variety of musical styles and as much animation as was humanly possible in the pre-cable, pre-video and pre-home computer world. He worshiped The Wonderful World of Disney and the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes whilst simultaneously developing an acutely sensitive bullshit detector, social conscience, and macabre sense of humor, fueled in part by the hypocrisy and smug self-satisfaction he found in his wealthy but emotionally bankrupt environment.

Finding a cohort of like-minded misfits (who later morphed into The Irritants, Dean’s studio band), Dean spent his teens immersed in theater and art, both in and out of school. By the age of 13, he had hit upon the method of getting out of assigned papers by instead making movies on a borrowed 8 mm camera. By high school, he and a friend were selling their animation efforts to Chicago public television. Graduating from Lake Forest High School in 1981, Dean focused on acting and set design in the community theater. It was at this time that he discovered European, Canadian and Russian animation that broke Disney's rules of theme as well as introducing animation techniques other than traditional two-dimensional character animation or stop motion puppets. On fire, but still loyal to Disney, Dean applied to the Disney training school California Institute of the Arts. When acceptance wasn't forthcoming, he enrolled in Carroll College, outside of Milwaukee, to study life drawing, graphic design, and theater. Before the second semester was up, the art professors confessed he was teaching them more then they were teaching him, and Dean made the decision to strike out on his own.

Between 1984 and 1988, Dean cut his teeth on Left to Write, a handcrafted fantasy adventure feature done predominantly with stop motion clay characters. The kid who had rebelled against term papers and math class learned to plot out the mathematical nuances required to bring his original script to fruition in a 24 frames per second format. His friends brought their talents to his aide, and The Irritants were born to provide the soundtrack. The studio band developed a life of its own, and to date seven Irritants albums have been produced.

By 1991, Dean had moved to video rather than film, with its more demanding 30 frames per second, to produce The Irritants Eye Wax, 25 minutes of music videos, containing live-action and a sequence of experiments with different animation techniques. This was followed by The Thirteenth Bat, a traditional two-dimensional hand drawn cel project completed in 1992, which won awards at film and video festivals. Dean then embarked on the project The Rise and Demise of Grizelda, but was frustrated with the limits of his medium. As means of escape from Grizzelda, he began drawing Numbering Bad Fruit, an unscripted stream of consciousness project concerned with his confusion over his sexual orientation. Fruit was completed within five months, and went on to win awards and recognition, including the commission of Queer and Loathing interstertials for a PBS series about people living with the HIV virus. While Fruit was making it's rounds in the festivals, Dean completed Don't Forget to Bring Your Eyes, utilizing a wide variety of animation techniques.

Dean has made the move to computer-assisted animation in order to exploit it's digitized technical quality, but remains faithful to handcrafting the artwork. Passionately driven, Dean strives to create art that will provoke the viewer into discovering and understanding the roots of one's own perspective in hopes this will in turn benefit society, which certainly needs all the love, understanding and ass kicking it can get.

His latest animated offering is Weed the People, an artistically dizzying four minute treatise on equal rights in America.