Stephanie Dinkins

Stephanie Dinkins is an artist who builds artificial intelligence systems developed in direct conversation with communities of color. Her practice interrogates how AI is created, trained, and deployed, centering the voices and histories of Black communities in technological development. Dinkins was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, recognizing her groundbreaking work at the intersection of art, technology, and racial justice.

Dinkins' artistic practice includes Not the Only One (N'TOO), an AI system trained on Black family oral history, which represents a fundamental reimagining of what training data can be and whose stories matter in machine learning. Since 2014, she has engaged in ongoing conversations with Bina48, a humanoid robot, exploring questions of identity, consciousness, and representation. Her work has earned recognition including the Mozilla Rise25 Award in 2025. Dinkins holds the Kusama Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University, where she continues to develop and refine her approaches to community-engaged AI creation.

As a speaker, Dinkins offers audiences a rare perspective grounded in years of collaborative artistic practice with communities of color. She addresses the urgent question of who gets to build AI systems and what happens when marginalized communities participate in their own technological representation. Her work demonstrates that AI development is not inevitable or neutral, but rather a site of creative possibility and political contestation. Audiences encounter not abstract theory but concrete examples of alternative approaches to artificial intelligence that center care, history, and community wisdom.