Dinizulu Gene Tinnie

Dinizulu Gene Tinnie is a New York-born, Miami-based visual artist and designer, writer, retired educator, and community activist in historical preservation, cultural affairs, and issues of social justice and equality, with a formal academic background in foreign languages, literature and linguistics. His lifelong attraction to artmaking, however, would be reawakened during a stint as a Fulbright scholar in Europe and would continue to grow in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, and, ultimately, Florida, where his local career especially as a proactive force of historic change, was catapulted by joining the historic Miami Black Arts Workshop in Coconut Grove in 1974. Here, his art would indeed become inseparable from social action on numerous fronts, and includes, most significantly, a longstanding and ongoing Middle Passage Ship Replica Project (“a journey as much as a destination”) to “tell the story that must be told,” virtually and physically, of our shared collective heritage.