Michael Dinwiddie

Michael D. Dinwiddie (December 13, 1954 – July 4, 2025) was an American playwright, academic, composer and scholar of Black theater. In addition to his own work and contribution to Black literature and theatre, he led major efforts which led to New York University commemorating the African Grove Theater as part of a new building opening in 2023.

Life and career Born on December 13, 1954, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, as a self-described “Okie from Muskogee,” Dinwiddie was among the early graduates of New York University’s experimental college of interdisciplinary studies, which would later become the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Investiture in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre (2018) President of the August Wilson Society

Dinwiddie died following a brief illness in New York City, on July 4, 2025. Syncopated Stages, an exhibit at New York Public Library's Library for the Performing Arts which Dinwiddie was curating opened on September 17, 2025.

Dinwiddie was survived by his husband, Vincent H. Parham Jr. and extended family.

Works Fiction Invisible Life Holy Ground

Plays The Beautiful LaSalles (1990), produced by the Crossroads Theater Company, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Northern Lights 1966 (2018), at the Mosaic Youth Theatre in Detroit, Michigan in May 2018. a staged reading was directed by Clinton Turner Davis and produced by Woodie King at the Castillo Theatre, New York, on 23 June 2018. Actuary (2018), one-act play directed by Kristi Papaille in Louisville, Kentucky, in November 2018.

Nonfiction

Dinwiddie, Michael. “African Grove Theatre’s Radical Roots.” Black Masks, vol. 27, no. 2, 2021, pp. 14–14. Dinwiddie, Michael. “Black Panther Meets Pink Panther” in Madhubuti, Haki R., and Herb Boyd, editors. Black Panther : Paradigm Shift or Not?: A Collection of Reviews and Essays on a Blockbuster Film. Third World Press Foundation, 2019. Dinwiddie, Michael, editor (2022). Holy ground : the National Black Theatre Festival anthology. Theatre Communications Group. Dinwiddie, Michael. "World War I: The Harlem HellFighters” in Kraaz, Sarah Mahler, editor. Music and War in the United States. Routledge, 2019.