Sarah Stefana Smith

Sarah Stefana Smith is an artist-scholar based between Massachusetts and Washington D.C. whose work communicates between Black art and culture, queer of color critique, visuality and performance. As a studio artist, they work predominantly in photography, sculpture and installation. Abstraction, materiality, space and ecology are explored using barrier materials—deer, bird, and safety netting, chicken wire and fishing line—to comment on boundaries between human and species, lines of demarcation around difference—race, gender, sexuality, and how modes of difference are used to constitute and congeal belonging. Smith has exhibited in spaces,including IA&A at Hillyer and DC Art Center (Washington, D.C.), Arlington Art Center (Arlington. VA), Borland Project Space (State College, PA), Waller Gallery and Gallery CA (Baltimore, MD), and David Spectrum (Toronto, ON). Smith was an artist-in-resident at the University of Pittsburgh with The Creativities Project (2020) and has published writing in the Journal of Women & Performance (2018), The Black Scholar (2019) and Bmore Arts, among others. Smith received their PhD from the University of Toronto, and MFA from Goddard College. They are Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College.