Dorothy Dean – Who Are You Dorothy Dean?
Who Are You Dorothy Dean?, edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo / Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al. / bilingual edition (English / French), English translation by Rachel Valinsky / 296-page paperback published in 2024 by Éditions 1989 (France) / ISBN 9782958108410
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This book features Dorothy Dean’s unpublished writing and selected correspondence with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, and Taylor Mead, among other friends and artists. It also includes Dean’s transcendent script of an unrealized film starring Factory-actor Ondine. Lyrical, humorous, political, and brutally honest, Who Are You Dorothy Dean? is a tribute to one of the few prominent African American women of New York City’s bohemian heyday.
Dorothy Dean (1932-1987) was an African American writer and actress. She entered the 1960s New York underground scene and quickly became one of its key, if overlooked, figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol’s films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Presumably the first woman ever hired as fact-checker at The New Yorker, Dean held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her very own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier, in 1976.
