Dorothy Dean

Who was Dorothy Dean?

Dorothy Dean was an African American socialite, connected to Andy Warhol's The Factory—for which she appeared in the films Batman Dracula, Space, My Hustler, Afternoon, and Chelsea Girls —and Max's Kansas City, where she worked as door person. She also appeared in the documentary film Superartist about Warhol and his films.

Dean, who graduated from Radcliffe and earned an MFA at Harvard, had a master's degree in art. While living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she began associating almost entirely with gay white men, presumably in an effort to distance herself from the politics surrounding being both black and female in the fifties and sixties, politics with which she did not identify.

She was loved for her strong, verbose personality, perhaps mostly for her playful phrasing and clever nicknames. She rarely worked; she held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as The New Yorker and Vogue magazines.

Born in White Plains, New York in 1932, she died of cancer in Boulder, Colorado on February 13, 1987.