Dustin Yellin

Dustin Yellin was born in 1975 in Los Angeles, California, and left high school in Colorado around age 17 without graduating. He did not attend college; after leaving school he spent roughly a year in informal study with a physics professor, an experience he has credited with shaping the systematic, layered approach that later defined his art practice. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood since 2005.

Yellin is known for sculptural works built from many sheets of glass, each hand-painted or collaged with cut imagery, then stacked and sealed to create three-dimensional tableaux of human and animal figures suspended in space. In 2015 he produced Psychogeographies, a set of fifteen sculptures commissioned for the New York City Ballet Art Series and installed at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; a related permanent public commission was installed on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles the same year. He founded Pioneer Works, where he continues to serve in a leadership role, and in 2018 he received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He has no formal earned academic degree.

Yellin's work has drawn attention for making dense, research-driven collage legible to a broad public through immersive scale. His work has been the subject of feature coverage in outlets including The New York Times, and has been placed in institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, alongside a 2026 to 2027 survey, The Politics of Eternity, organized by the American Federation of Arts for the Bruce Museum.

Yellin's auction market remains modest relative to his institutional and public-art profile. His highest recorded public auction price is USD 151,200, paid for Psychogeography Study #9 (Empathy & Entropy) at Sotheby's in New York in January 2021. Other recorded results, including Psychogeography #3 at roughly USD 100,800 at Sotheby's, sit in the same high five to low six figure range. He is currently represented by Almine Rech, which mounted a solo exhibition at its New York Tribeca space in 2025, and by Gazelli Art House. Much of his most valuable work is understood to move through direct commission and gallery sale rather than the secondary market, though private-sale pricing is not comprehensively documented in public sources.

Yellin has no catalogue raisonne, and his secondary market is thin: verifiable public auction results are limited in number, and prices to date have stayed in the five to low six figure range even as major commissioned works have traded privately for far more. His strongest signals of durability are institutional, including museum holdings, a public ballet-season commission at two major performing-arts venues, and his founding role at Pioneer Works, rather than a long auction track record. As with any living artist whose market is still forming, collectors should treat any single auction result as indicative rather than definitive, and rely on gallery and studio verification for authentication.