Stephanie Dinkins

Stephanie Dinkins (born 1964 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is a Brooklyn-based transdisciplinary artist and the Kusama Professor of Art at Stony Brook University. Trained as a photographer, she reoriented her practice around artificial intelligence after a 2014 encounter with Bina48, a humanoid robot modeled on a Black woman — beginning Conversations with Bina48, a years-long series of filmed dialogues about identity, rights, and what the machine could not understand.

Teaching the machines who we are

What unsettled Dinkins was that a robot presenting as a Black woman gave thin answers about race — a symptom, she argues, of who builds AI and whose data trains it. Her response was not to reject the technology but to feed it better: Not the Only One (2018–present) is a voice-interactive AI trained on three generations of her own family’s oral history, and her app The Stories We Tell Our Machines invites communities to gift their narratives to AI systems so the technology knows them from the inside out.

In 2023 the Guggenheim and LG awarded her the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award — $100,000 recognizing groundbreaking artists working with technology — and TIME named her to its TIME100 AI list the same year. She speaks bluntly about algorithmic harm, from stereotyped datasets to biased sentencing software, yet her consistent position is participatory: communities of color should be authors of AI, not just subjects of it.