Julia Dean (July 22, 1830 – March 6, 1868) was an American actress who made her New York debut at 16 in a starring role with the James Sheridan Knowles comedy, The Hunchback.

[4][5][6] Her first stage appearance was at age 12 in a minor role in Last Days of Pompeii, presented in the theater managed by her father in Rochester, New York in the early 1840s.

In the March 7, 1868 edition of The New York Times, the paper said of her debut performance: [This was] a part that she almost monopolized on the American stage, for the immediately succeeding years.

Dean was the original Norma in Epes Sargent's Priestess, and the first to play Leonor in George Henry Boker's tragedy about Eleanor de Guzmán.

She eventually secured a divorce in the mid-1860s, and not long afterwards married, at Salt Lake City, James G. Cooper, a native of New York who served with the federal administration of the Utah Territory.

Dean's funeral services were held at Christ Church on the corner of 5th Avenue and 35th Street; her remains were laid to rest at Laurel Grove Cemetery, Port Jervis, New York.