Born in Brooklyn, Dinnerstein attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. As a teenager, he studied with Moses Soyer and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Julien Levy. In 1950, he graduated from Tyler Art School and Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1956 he traveled with Burton Silverman to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Montgomery Bus Boycott was unfolding. Dinnerstein and Silverman documented the citywide protests in a series of drawings, now in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Dinnerstein taught at the School of Visual Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League for many years. Dinnerstein exhibited widely and his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, and many other collections.
