Terry Smith is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney, and Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School, Professor at Large in The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah, and Faculty at Large, Curatorial Studies Program, School of Visual Arts, New York. He is also the Slade Professor of Fine Arts, University of Cambridge, 2025-2026.
Professor Smith has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1996. In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). In 2022, CAA conferred on him its Distinguished Teacher of Art History Award. He is author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2015), The Contemporary Composition (Sternberg Press, 2016), One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke University Press, 2107), Art to come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2019), Curating the Complex & The Open Strike (Sternberg and MIT Press, 2021), Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images (Anthem Press, 2022), and, with Fred R. Myers, Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation (Duke University Press, 2024). He is currently editing Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings (two volumes, Duke University Press, 2025). A founding Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and is Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. See www.terryesmith.net/web/about.
