About Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean (b. 1965, Canterbury) is a British artist who works primarily in 16 mm film, alongside drawing, photography, sound and writing. She studied at Falmouth University, graduating in 1988, and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1990 to 1992. In 1995 she was included in General Release: Young British Artists at the Venice Biennale. She moved to Berlin in 2000, and lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles.
Tacita Dean is known for long takes, steady camera positions and quiet, often silent soundtracks. Her subjects include the sea and failed voyages, such as the story of the sailor Donald Crowhurst in her film Disappearance at Sea (1996), obsolete structures and places, and the lives of other artists and thinkers. Her works on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the East Berlin television tower (Fernsehturm, 2001), the last Kodak film factory in Europe (Kodak, 2006), Cy Twombly and Merce Cunningham are among her best known. She also works with found photographs and postcards, as in her book Floh (2001), and with blackboard drawings. She campaigns for the survival of analogue film as a medium.
Tacita Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006. She had a solo exhibition at Tate Britain in 2001 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. In 2011 she made FILM, a silent 35 mm work for the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. In 2009 she received the Kurt Schwitters Prize. The Menil Collection in Houston showed her exhibition Blind Folly from 2024 to 2025. The limited edition photographs of Tacita Dean include Lord Byron Died, published for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
