Penelope Dean is a scholar and design critic. Her work on the intersections of design, architecture, and business culture has appeared in publications ranging from Harvard Design Magazine to Log and in anthologies including International Design Organizations and Bruce Goff: Material Worlds. She is founding editor of Flat Out, an independent print magazine supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She previously practiced as an architect for the Dutch Office MVRDV in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Dean was Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture at Montreal, a Scholar-in-Residence at Chicago’s Newberry Library, and most recently a Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Institute for the Humanities during the 2023–2024 academic year. She is currently completing the book project Game Plans, which recounts the untold history of a group of Chicago-based designers who assimilated marketing theories into their design practices between the mid-1950s and late-1970s. She is Professor in the School of Architecture at UIC.

Dean received her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Technology, Sydney Australia, Master of Architecture from The Berlage Institute, Rotterdam The Netherlands, and her PhD in Critical Architecture Culture from UCLA.