Felicia Francine Dean investigates the underrepresented cultural, racial, and social narratives embedded within interior architecture and objects. Dean is an Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture & Design’s School of Interior Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Dean’s creative scholarship studies the human spatial experience of identity by revealing and translating cultural and social narratives of space and place embodied within interiors. Her study questions how the surroundings have impacted cultural, racial, and social identity and how these three factors have redefined the built environment.
In her talk, Dean investigates connections between interior objects and histories, culture, materiality, craft, space, and place, identity, and personal narrative. In particular, she shares her exploration of textiles, physically and abstractly, to uncover the buried stories within interior artifacts.
Dean spatially investigates materials, materiality, and textiles through the context of history, characteristics of an object’s physical and emotional functions, and the embodied spatial stories of their beholders. Her inquiry broadens design perspectives through its relationship to identity as a multidisciplinary, handcraft, and technological approach.
The research develops through the lens of textiles while expanding the interrelationship of fibers with other materials such as wood and stone, analog and digital fabrication, and time-based media. Her scholarship synthesizes opposing perceived definitions of identification of hard and soft materials, physical and intangible materials, and hand and digital processes. Her projects engage diverse methods of making with the materials and processes to harmonize their stories and create emotional experiences unfamiliar to people's everyday visual and physical communication with interior objects.
Dean’s project “Perceptions of Misconceptions: Intersecting Stone and Fabric Material Identities,” is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. A visual essay of her work, “Dug by the Devil: Space, Culture, + Material Identity,” was recently published in the book “Public Interiority: Politics and Programs.” In 2024, she completed the Praxis Fiber Workshop’s DWL Artist in Residency and had her work featured in a group exhibition at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Sandra J. Blaine Gallery.
Her creative works reside in the Museum for Art in Wood’s permanent collection and within prominent private collections. Recently, the Interior Design Educators Council recognized Dean’s teaching with the 2024 IDEC Teaching Excellence Award and Best Presentation for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at their 2024 International Conference.
Dean earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in Interior Architecture from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
