BIO

Grounded in the spirit of Charles Hamilton Houston’s adage that a lawyer is either a social engineer or a social parasite, Atinuke “Tinu” Akintola Diver grounds her creative, legal, and community practices in ways that seek to build and regenerate, rather than to purely extract and exploit. Diver co-directed the film documentary short QUILT JOURNEYS which premiered at the Blackstar Film Festival and screened at Alice Fest, the Carrboro Film Festival, the Hayti Heritage Film Festival, the River Run Film Festival, the Longleaf Film Festival and BEYOND:The Cary Film Festival. She also co-produced the audio documentary short, MASTERPIECE, and directed and produced the film documentary short 98 which premiered at the Carrboro Film Festival.

A first-generation American and the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Diver was born in Boston, Massachusetts, raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland and currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. She earned a BA in and JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is also a graduate of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is the recipient of numerous grants including the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County Artist Support Grant, the Southern Documentary Fund Production Grant, the Filmed in NC Fund, the Southern and Documentary Fund Research and Development Grant.

Tinu is currently producing and directing her first feature-length documentary, THIS BELONGS TO US, which was selected for the Working Films/Cucalorus Works-in-Progress Lab and also screened at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Carolina Works-In-Progress.

Her published writing includes her essays Running Into Glass Doors from Talking Taboo: American Christian Women Get Frank about Faith and A Park Is A Message from Volume I of the Black Oak Society Zine.