Stephanie Smith is a Chicago-based curator, writer, and arts leader whose collaborative, socially engaged projects assert art’s power to envision and enact other futures. She values place-responsive, generous, and hospitable ways of working—honed through 25+ years of curatorial practice including senior roles at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond, Virginia. In 2022, Smith joined Awi’nakola (“we are one with the land and the sea”), a project based in British Columbia in which artists, scientists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers are seeking effective responses to the climate crisis and working together to regenerate land and culture.
Key curatorial projects include Rashid Johnson: Monument (ICA), Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Smart + tour, received Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award) and Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (Smart + ICI + tour). Notable co-curated projects include Commonwealth (Beta-Local + Philadelphia Contemporary + ICA), Agora: 4th Athens Biennial, and Heartland (Smart + VanAbbemuseum). Smith teaches, writes, serves on the advisory board for MARCH, and was a contributing editor at Afterall journal. She served as Provostial Researcher at the University of Chicago’s Franke Institute for the Humanities (2022–2023), holds an MA from Rice University, and is researching Chicagoland—on long-term, place-based, artist-led projects in Chicago—for her PhD with the University of Amsterdam.
__2001.jpg?w=1600)
