About the Artist

Dist1nct is the artistic identity of Tyson Etienne — professional basketball player, photographer, and painter born and raised in New York City.

His work lives at the intersection of two lives most people assume can't coexist: the athlete and the artist. While building a professional basketball career that took him from undrafted to the NBA — becoming the 5,000th player in league history — Etienne was quietly documenting all of it. The empty gyms at 6 a.m. The bus rides. The cities passed through. The stillness between the noise.

That instinct to observe became Dist1nct Studios, a body of work spanning photography, painting, and documentary storytelling. His practice is an act of witness — a decade-long record of the spaces between achievement, the unglamorous hours where a life is actually built. Much of it is rendered in black and white, a deliberate choice: stripped of color, nothing gets to hide. What remains is light, shadow, gesture, and truth.

Basketball taught him repetition. Art taught him attention. Dist1nct is where the two meet — proof that discipline and creativity aren't opposites, but the same practice wearing different clothes, kept day by day.

Selected works include 1/82, a limited-edition hardcover photo book chronicling a season through 82 curated images, and A Journey Seldom Seen, a photographic exhibition spanning 2016–2025.

The "1" in the name isn't a typo. It's the thesis: every journey is singular, and the only honest way to render one is from inside it.

Etienne lives and works in New York.

Dist1nct Studios — New York City