Stephanie Dinkins
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art.
She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins’ art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production.
Dinkins earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1997 and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private, and institutional venues – by design. Dinkins is an Artist Fellow of the Berggruen Institute and Lucas Artists Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Art Center, CA Past fellowships and residencies include at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Creative Capital, Soros Equality Fellowship, Data and Society Research Institute Fellowship, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC, Blue Mountain Center; The Laundromat Project; Santa Fe Art Institute and Art/Omi.
The New York Times featured Dinkins in its pages as an AI influencer. Apple Inc recognized Dinkins’ research and community-centered efforts by featuring her as a local hero in their “Behind the Mac” ad campaign (Brooklyn, NY edition). Wired, Art In America, Artsy, Art21, Hyperallergic, the BBC, Wilson Quarterly, and a host of popular podcasts have recently highlighted Dinkins' art and ideas.
Project: Secret Garden
Secret Garden, an immersive storytelling installation that combines audio vignettes told by black women with dynamic, responsive visual feedback. The work is experienced as a non-linear, episodic narrative of a multi-generational past, present, and future simultaneously. Conceived by artist Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden is inspired by autobiographical, ancestral, and futuristic experiences that highlight black female consciousness throughout history.
Secret Garden was commissioned by Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) residency program which engages NEW INC alumni and Nokia Bell Labs researchers for a year-long collaboration to produce new works of art that are enabled by Bell Labs technology.