Humanitarian Award

2023 Award Recipient

Michael D. Dinwiddie

Photo Credit: D'Ambrose Boyd

Michael D. Dinwiddie’s (Gallatin ’80, Tisch ’83) teaching interests include cultural studies, African American theater history, dramatic writing, filmmaking, and ragtime music.

A dramatist whose works have been produced in New York, regional, and educational theater, Professor Dinwiddie has been a playwright-in-residence at Michigan State University and St. Louis University and has taught writing courses at the College of New Rochelle, Florida A&M University, SUNY Stony Brook, California State University at San Bernardino, and Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He spent a year at Touchstone Pictures as a Walt Disney Fellow and worked as a staff writer on ABC-TV’s Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. He was also awarded a 1995 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting.

Professor Dinwiddie received a 2005 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award recognizing that one of NYU's primary institutional priorities, along with research, is exceptional teaching inside and outside the classroom. In 2015, he was awarded a team-teaching grant from the NYU Humanities Initiative for the course, Movements for Justice and Rights: Let Them Lead the Way. His course offerings include Migration and American Culture; Dramatizing History I and II; Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip-Hop; James Reese Europe and American Music; Sissle, Blake and the Minstrel Tradition; Guerrilla Screenwriting; Motown Matrix: Race, Gender, and Class Identity in “The Sound of Young America;” and the study-abroad course Buenos Aires: In and of the City.

Professor Dinwiddie is also an affiliate faculty member at NYU Abu Dhabi, where, in 2015 and 2017, he taught the courses Cultural Memory and Resistance, and Dramatizing History. He serves as co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove Theatre, which is located in NYU's John A. Paulson Center at 181 Mercer Street.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award is annually presented to a humanitarian within the NYU community who embodies and exemplifies the characteristics promoted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—"a vision of peace, persistence in purpose, and inspirational action." The recipient must be an NYU alumnus or alumna, or a current NYU faculty or staff member.

The 2023 Humanitarian Award recipient will be celebrated during NYU MLK Week (February 13–18) and honored at the University-Wide Event on Thursday, February 16.