Stephanie Dinkins

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist, educator, and Yayoi Kusama Professor of Art at Stony Brook University whose practice centers on community-participatory platforms for dialogue about AI as it intersects race, gender, aging, and data sovereignty — specifically working with communities of color to co-create equitable AI ecosystems (see Person entry). She is tracked here as a Voice because her sustained public-facing output — Not the Only One (N'TOO), Conversations with Bina48, and the Future Histories Studio — engages Black communities and other communities of color directly in AI critique and co-development, embodying the data-sovereignty argument that communities should be technology developers, not merely subjects of technology designed elsewhere.

Voice anchor

Dinkins anchors the community-participatory-AI-art register — the corpus's voice slot for an individual whose practice places communities of color inside the AI-making process, as co-creators and co-designers, rather than studying AI's harms from outside or advocating policy on behalf of affected communities.

The existing corpus AI-critical voices occupy adjacent but distinct registers: Joy Buolamwini works through algorithmic-accountability research and bias auditing (Algorithmic Justice League, Gender Shades); Kate Crawford works through academic critique and museum-scale art-research (Atlas of AI, the Knowing Machines Project); Trevor Paglen works through counter-surveillance disclosure and participatory-dataset-critique (ImageNet Roulette, Excavating AI). None of these occupies the register Dinkins anchors: training AI on community oral histories rather than critiquing training data from outside; teaching data sovereignty to communities who rarely enter AI-design spaces; founding an institutional lab explicitly dedicated to co-creating AI with communities of color rather than researching how AI affects them.

The gap Dinkins fills is not a redundancy of the algorithmic-bias or dataset-critique registers already in the corpus — it is a distinct shape: art practice as community AI development, with the community as the knowledge source, design partner, and intended beneficiary of the system.

Core practice and signature works

Not the Only One (N'TOO). Dinkins's signature project — research begun in late 2017 — is an AI entity trained on oral histories from three generations of women in Dinkins's Black American family. The system operates as a voice-interactive chatbot designed to give AI cultural roots, deep history, and a Black-community perspective that is absent from mainstream AI training data. Unlike conventional AI systems that process vast, heterogeneous datasets, N'TOO deliberately uses limited, carefully curated community-provided oral-history data — making algorithmic bias and the limits of intelligent technologies the explicit subject rather than a hidden effect. The project explores "culturally specific, natural language-based AI that reflects the goals of the communities making them," raising critical questions about data sovereignty, algorithmic bias, and equity in AI design. N'TOO has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Seattle Art Fair, Carnegie Mellon University, Stony Brook University, and galleries across New York. Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023) profile specifically highlighted N'TOO as Dinkins's central contribution to AI justice practice, naming the absence of Black community perspective in AI training data as the gap it addresses.

Conversations with Bina48 (2014–present). An ongoing series of videotaped dialogues with BINA48 — Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, a social robot created by the Terasem Movement Foundation and modeled on Bina Rothblatt, a Black woman — that Dinkins began in 2014. The conversations explore race, gender, consciousness, transhumanism, and social equity through a decade of exchanges ranging across racism, faith, loneliness, and the ethics of artificial consciousness. The defining discovery Dinkins brought into public view: BINA48 had been programmed with no knowledge of its Black female identity, Black history, or what it means to be a Black woman in America — despite being physically modeled on one. The conversations expose this absence structurally, making it visible to museum audiences who encounter the exchanges across multiple video screens. Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2 (2015), a four-channel video installation capturing early dialogues, is held in the Whitney Museum of American Art's permanent collection; the series has also been shown at the International Center of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Harvard University's Cooper Gallery, the de Young Museum, and Walker Art Center.

Future Histories Studio. A community-centered research and practice lab Dinkins founded at Stony Brook University's Staller Center for the Arts. The studio works at the intersection of emerging technologies and social justice — specifically incorporating diverse perspectives into AI development and creating equitable technological systems that "uplift and amplify narratives of the global majority." The studio operates with research and operations staff, graduate assistants, and artists in residence, producing community AI projects, digital platforms, and installations alongside its academic work.

Public output and engagement

Dinkins's practice reaches distinct audiences through four overlapping channels.

• Museum and gallery circuit. Conversations with Bina48 has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art (permanent collection), International Center of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Harvard's Cooper Gallery, the de Young Museum, and Walker Art Center — reaching art-going publics who encounter AI critique as an embodied, time-based experience across multiple video channels rather than as policy argument.
• Community co-creation. N'TOO trains AI alongside, not merely about, communities of color. Future Histories Studio workshops and projects put community members in the AI-design process directly — a participatory structure that treats communities as technology developers. This channel reaches publics who would not otherwise encounter AI-design processes.
• Academic and institutional advocacy. As Artist in Residence at Stanford HAI and a Data and Society Research Institute Fellow, Dinkins advocates for data sovereignty and community-participatory AI design within the institutions that shape AI research norms — carrying the community-AI argument into technical AI contexts.
• Public recognition and discourse. Time 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023), inaugural LG Guggenheim Award (2023), Creative Capital grantee (2019), Soros Equality Fellow, US Artist Fellow (2021), Knight Arts & Tech Fellow — a recognition trail spanning AI-specialist (Time 100 AI), art-institution (Guggenheim, Creative Capital), and civil-society (Soros, Knight) channels simultaneously.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is warranted — rather than additional structure on the Person entry — because Dinkins's public-facing practice is the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: Not the Only One as a concrete intervention in AI training data, giving Black family oral histories computational form; Conversations with Bina48 as a decade-long public exposure of how racial and gender identity are absent from AI systems nominally representing communities of color, with the Whitney's permanent collection acquisition as institutional uptake; and the Future Histories Studio as an ongoing institutional channel for community-participatory AI development. The corpus's AI-critical voices had covered algorithmic-bias research, dataset-politics critique, and surveillance-disclosure photography, but had no voice anchoring the community co-creation register — the practice shape that makes communities the producers of AI rather than its subjects or critics. Dinkins's entry closes that gap. Per the corpus's 2026-09-01 scope ruling on individual AI-critical artists: her practice engages non-AI publics (Black communities, communities of color, museum audiences) directly in AI critique and development, and her traceable movement connections — Data & Society Research Institute fellowship, Knight Foundation, Creative Capital, Stanford HAI, Whitney permanent collection — confirm movement uptake and institutional collaboration well beyond standalone commentary. Biographical detail and affiliations are recorded on the linked Person entry.