Stephanie Dinkins is an acclaimed transmedia artist and thought leader working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, race, gender, and social justice. Internationally recognized for her groundbreaking explorations of equity in emerging technologies, Dinkins is best known for Conversations with Bina48 and Not The Only One (N’TOO)—two landmark projects that challenge traditional narratives by embedding Black familial histories, voices, and experiences into the framework of AI.
Her work centers on co-creating culturally attuned AI in collaboration with coders, engineers, and, most critically, local communities of color. Dinkins fosters grassroots AI literacy and civic data practices, building generative data commons and machine learning systems grounded in care, complexity, and mutual accountability. Her studio practice fuses storytelling, algorithmic critique, and speculative design to ask: What would AI look like if it emerged from communities historically excluded from its design?
Dinkins’ installations and AI-driven sculptures have been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Queens Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, as well as in public spaces from Detroit to Brooklyn. In 2025, she presented Data Trust at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, and premiered Secret Garden at BAM’s Next Wave/Under the Radar Festival. Her outdoor installation If We Don’t Who Will?, commissioned by More Art, reimagines AI as a tool for public memory and community futures on the streets of Brooklyn.
In recognition of her visionary work, Dinkins was named a 2025 Lincoln Center Collider Fellow, where she explored the convergence of live performance and digital intelligence. She organized Unsettling Intelligences at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics—a symposium with the Guggenheim New York that interrogated power, reason, and the machine. Her work continues to be widely featured, with recent coverage in The Guardian, The New York Times, Art Papers, and Frieze.
Dinkins is the inaugural recipient of the LG-Guggenheim Award (2023), a United States Artist Fellow, and a Mozilla Rise25 Award honoree. She is also a 2050 AI Senior Fellow with Schmidt Futures. Her voice resonates across disciplines as a frequent keynote speaker, panelist, and educator, with talks at Harvard, Yale, RISD, and international summits from Abu Dhabi to the Aspen Institute.
As the Yayoi Kusama Professor of Art at Stony Brook University, Dinkins teaches courses in art and AI, and directs the Future Histories Studio, a research platform advancing culturally inclusive technologies. She is affiliated with the university’s AI Innovation Institute and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science.
Stephanie’s work, both poetic and political, insists on agency—using AI not as a novelty, but as a medium of memory, identity, and cultural preservation. Her 2024 monograph Stephanie Dinkins: On Love & Data (University of Michigan Press) offers an in-depth look at her evolving practice and philosophy of Afro-now-ism. At its core, Dinkins’ work asks: What would it mean to build AI systems that reflect, protect, and serve our shared humanity? In asking this, she helps us imagine a future where technology is an act of care.
How does AI influence identity?
Most of the words we have available to think about ourselves as human construct worlds that silently imply supremacy, and a false dichotomy between humans on the one hand and nature and machines on the other. Escaping the recursive futures on the horizon requires understanding ourselves as participants in an expanding continuum of intelligences, sandwiched between technology such as AI, biotech and gene editing, and a greater understanding of the ancient bacterial systems from which we emanate. The question that follows is how humans can closely examine and reconcile our past, and reorient our motives toward more expansive and equitable visions of what is and what can be.
What are ethical AI considerations?
The consideration I keep returning to is whether it is possible to use the widespread reach and growing power of AI to create systems of care, hospitality and resilience. That leads directly to governance. What can governance of the people, by the people and for the people look like in an AI mediated world? Can we use that same reach and power to create governance of care, hospitality and resilience, and systems that consider and meaningfully implement the will of the people?
How to bridge culture and tech?
Creative experiments with artificially intelligent systems can lead toward bottom up implementation of those systems, implementation that works toward a more equitable distribution of wealth, power and justice. Widely deployed AI can support bottom up decision making, and provide the public means to directly inform the systems that govern us while also empowering the governed.
