22 Facts About Baba Brinkman

Dirk Murray Brinkman was born on October 22,1978 and is a Canadian rapper and playwright best known for recordings and performances that combine hip hop music with literature, theatre, and science.

Baba Brinkman's childhood was divided between Vancouver and the Kootenay region of British Columbia.

Baba Brinkman spent his early summers in remote tree planting camps, and began planting trees himself at the age of 15.

Baba Brinkman studied human evolution and primatology with the orangutan researcher Birute Galdikas and wrote his thesis comparing modern Hip hop freestyle battling with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Baba Brinkman first gained widespread media attention for his one-man show The Rap Canterbury Tales, devised as a means of re-telling Chaucer's iconic stories for a modern audience.

In 2011, Baba Brinkman premiered The Canterbury Tales Remixed at the Soho Playhouse in New York City.

In 2008, Baba Brinkman was commissioned to write a new rap show about evolution by Mark Pallen, microbiologist and author of The Rough Guide to Evolution.

The result was The Rap Guide to Evolution, a hip hop homage to Charles Darwin which Baba Brinkman first performed in Britain for the Darwin bicentennial in February 2009.

In 2010 the UK's largest biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust, provided grant funding for Baba Brinkman to make a series of educational music videos based on the show, as a resource for biology teachers.

The Rap Guide to Evolution completed a five-month Off-Broadway theatre run in November 2011, for which Baba Brinkman received a 2012 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance, losing to Irish actor Cillian Murphy.

In 2010 Baba Brinkman produced a Rationalist Anthem called Off That, attacking various forms of pseudoscience.

Baba Brinkman followed up his Darwin tribute with a sequel show specifically about evolutionary psychology, The Rap Guide to Human Nature, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010.

In March 2012, Baba Brinkman was announced as a songwriter-in-residence at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and spent a month at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as a guest of the Institute, along with DJ and music producer Jamie Simmonds.

Baba Brinkman later released "The Infomatic EP," a collection of hip-hop songs inspired by computational biology.

In 2015, Brinkman was commissioned by Arizona State University and Randolph M Nesse to write and produce an album titled The Rap Guide to Medicine, which communicates themes from evolutionary medicine.

In 2014 and 2016, Baba Brinkman attended the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ, performing a Rap Up or daily rap summary of the conference talks on Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind.

Baba Brinkman premiered "Rap Guide to Consciousness" at the 2017 Brighton Fringe, Winnipeg Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe to critical acclaim.

Baba Brinkman was commissioned by the WILD Foundation to produce The Rap Guide to Wilderness in 2014.

In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Baba Brinkman worked with Gary Yohe at Wesleyan University, a senior contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and co-recipient along with Al Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, to produce a new song and video titled "Erosion", summarizing data from the National Climate Assessment on the US-based physical impacts of climate change.

In 2021, Baba Brinkman founded Event Rap, a custom rap agency featuring a roster of independent hip-hop artists who write and perform original works for live events, as well as producing new rap videos on commission.

Baba Brinkman himself has been described as an "evangelical atheist" and has blogged about his encounters with creationists, both in educational settings and within his own family.

Ingenious Nature was reviewed unfavorably, and Baba Brinkman received criticism for "singling out women in the audience, pointing at them, and rapping about their ovulation cycles," among other things.