Dean Sakamoto is a practicing architect and educator with areas of expertise in sustainability, resilience, public education of topics related to the built environment. Sakamoto’s numerous architectural and urban design projects, exhibitions and publications are highly regarded for their sensitivity to place, audience and practical considerations. His practice, Dean Sakamoto Architects (DSA) which began in 1994, has completed a diverse range of award-winning design work from its offices in Honolulu and New Haven. In 2010, Mr. Sakamoto was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects for his notable contributions in architectural education.

Design, research and creative problem solving is the core of Mr. Sakamoto’s endeavors. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Oregon; a Master of Architecture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and Masters of Environmental Design from Yale University. As an educator, he served on the faculty of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998-2011 and taught previously at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture, Pratt Institute and Chaminade University of Honolulu. Also at Yale, he was the recipient of the prestigious Gertraud A. Wood Traveling Fellowship and Alpha Rho Chi Medal, and continues to serve as Associate Fellow at Benjamin Silliman College. For the City of New Haven, he served on the Mayor’s Cultural Affairs Commission, Chapel West Special Services District Advisory Board and the board of Sites Projects, Inc., a public art organization.

Mr. Sakamoto is an expert in the presentation and scholarship of architecture, design and planning topics. As Director of the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, he produced over 40 important exhibitions and their accompanying publications. His international traveling exhibition and book (Honolulu Academy of Arts and Yale University Press, 2007), Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff, helped to raise global awareness of architecture in Hawaii and one of its finest design architects.

In the new field of environmental resilience, Mr. Sakamoto heads the Urban Resilience Lab at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP). He also served as Deputy Director and Course Developer of the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at DURP. Resilience has to do with increasing society's ability to withstand and regenerate in the event of local or even widespread disruption (i.e. natural and/or human induced disasters). With a special focus on fine design and collaborative, personal service, Sakamoto applies over twenty five years of professional experience to his diversified environmental design practice. The success of DSA’s work is driven by Sakamoto’s passionate leadership, hands-on approach and elemental artistic sensibility.