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

He studied human evolution and primatology with the orangutan researcher Biruté Galdikas[7][non-primary source needed] and wrote his thesis comparing modern Hip hop freestyle battling with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

[8] 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.

[12] Brinkman's 2010 follow-up show, Rapconteur, premiered at the Edinburgh Free Fringe and featured hip hop adaptations of Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Finnish Kalevala.

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

[21] The Rap Guide to Evolution completed a five-month Off-Broadway theatre run in November 2011,[22] for which Brinkman received a 2012 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance, losing to Irish actor Cillian Murphy.

[24] and Brinkman has performed selections from his production on The Rachel Maddow Show[25] and at the Seattle Science Festival, sharing the stage with Jurassic Park palaeontologist Jack Horner and British physicist Stephen Hawking.

The video for Brinkman's unauthorized remix was released as part of an online science music festival called Geek Pop[27] and was popular with atheist blogs.

[37] The show explores theories from the cognitive science of religion and promotes religious naturalism, prompting American Humanist Association magazine to refer to Brinkman as "atheism's best salesman".

The title track of his 2023 album Rapsode makes a similar argument, likening today’s rappers-for-hire to the rhapsode tradition of ancient Greece, where professional poets would stitch together myths, tales and jokes with improvisational skill to suit the present listening audience.

[68][69] In addition to Brinkman himself, other notable members of the Event Rap artist roster include Abdominal, Kosha Dillz, and Mega Ran, as well as Freestyle Love Supreme regular Dizzy Senze and Brooklyn rapper Dex McBean, whose rap video about Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) was featured on the United Nations Environment Program’s “Decade on Restoration” initiative.

[77] The song "Tranquility Bank" from The Rap Guide to Wilderness received a hostile response from some environmentalists because of its assertion that urban living is better for the environment than back-to-the-land movements.