A draftsman and painter in the realistic tradition, his work included genre paintings, contemporary narratives, complex figurative compositions, portraits, and intimate images of his family and friends.
[4] Upon his return to New York City in the early 1950s, he was one of a group of recent Tyler graduates who resisted the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in order to paint in a figurative mode.
A New York Times reviewer likened his “deft and subtle figure drawings” to works by French artist Édouard Vuillard.
Inspired by the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1956, Dinnerstein traveled south to document the Civil Rights upheaval through a series of drawings.
From 1965 to 1980 Dinnerstein taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and from 1975 to 1992 at the National Academy of Design,[1] of which he was elected a member in 1974.