Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith (born September 25, 1967, in Riverside, California) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black life, memory, spirituality, Afrofuturism, experimental cinema, and Afro-diasporic histories. Working across film, installation, sculpture, drawing, and performance, Smith examines the imaginative and political possibilities of Black cultural production through poetic image-making, speculative narrative, and references to science fiction, music, ritual, and everyday life.  Smith studied at San Francisco State University, where she earned a B.A. in Creative Arts/Cinema, and later received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater, Film and Television. Her work often engages experimental film, non-Western cosmologies, poetry, Black feminist thought, and social history, using immersive installation, moving image, text, sound, and symbolic objects to consider liberation, mourning, collective memory, and the radical potential of the imagination.  Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has received numerous honors, including the United States Artists Fellowship, the Heinz Award for the Arts, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Cauleen Smith lives and works in Los Angeles.