With drawings and films that dissolve the boundary between lyrically poetic and coolly objective, Dean Smith investigates the aesthetics of wonder: a ceaseless human impulse to render the invisible visible. By exploring dichotomies such as geometry/biology, micro/macro, expansion/contraction, concrete/speculative, his work conflates these distinctions creating paradoxical conjunctions of opposites, and in doing so questions what constitutes the nature of intuitive and processed based strategies.

Smith's drawings have exhibited nationally and internationally with recent solo exhibitions at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, and Marvelli Gallery, New York. His drawings are represented in numerous public collections: The British Museum, London; the Hammer Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum.

His films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque; The 19th London Lesbian/Gay Film Festival at the National Theater, London; the Clarke Centre, Montreal; the Kunst Museum, Zurich; ATA: Artists Television Access, San Francisco; and in galleries nationally and internationally.

Dean Smith received a double B.A. in Art and the History of Art in 1984 and a M.F.A. degree in 1988 all from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship Award in 2002. Smith lives in Berkeley, California and works in neighboring West Oakland.