Dean Rosenthal is an American composer of and writer on contemporary and experimental music, field recordings, digital pastiche, sound collage, and installations; performer, writer on music, and theorist; his instrumental music has been described as "thorny" and "modernist" (The New Yorker) and "original" (The New York Times). His works are performed, broadcast, choreographed, and installed internationally, primarily in North America and Europe at venues such as Ohrenhoch der Geräuschladen, Symphony Space, Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale, Spectrum, The Wulf, Electronic Music Foundation, Elastic Arts, Incubator Arts Project, at many universities and art schools, and outdoors, in situ, over 50 times across four continents, for Stones/Water/Time/Breath. His writings have been published in The Open Space Magazine, The Ear Reader, Musicworks, and other contemporary publications. He is currently writing the first oral history of 20th century American experimental music for Oxford University Press.

More recently he worked with Guggenheim Fellow David Parker's dance company The Bang Group, utilizing contemporary dance to express his instrumental music; this music was heard in dozens of performances from the Brooklyn Museum to hallowed dance center Jacob's Pillow to the Claquettes Club in Liege, Belgium. A commission in 2020 from the Oral History of American Music collection at Yale was first heard at the ReVox exhibition there and can be found in the The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Since 2012, he has made his home on Martha's Vineyard, where he composed his ongoing international performance piece Stones/Water/Time/Breath which in 2016 was given a 10 city, 3 country performance as part of the international Make Music Day festival; the performances became an annual event that ran for 6 years. Stones/Water/Time/Breath was released as a recording by Edition Wandelweiser Records, documenting five live performances from Newfoundland to Brooklyn to New York to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, the composer's hometown. Listen to Stones/Water/Time/Breath. In May of 2021, Tone Glow Records released an archival recording of Cornelius Cardew's "The Great Learning" performed by the Montreal Scratch Orchestra that was organized and conducted by the composer and received vibrant reviews.