About Sarah Stefana Smith

Dr. Sarah Stefana Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar and visual artist. Their research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer theory and affect studies, visuality and aesthetics. Dr. Smith is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Born to two Brooklyn, New York natives, and growing up in the planned communities of Columbia, Maryland, their creative work explores the intersection of repair and disrepair, aesthetics and visuality in difference (e.g. race, gender, sexuality).

Sarah was a recipient of an Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, an Ontario Arts Council Grant, and a John Pavlis Fellowship as an artist—in—residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Their artist—in—residences have included the University of Pittsburgh through the Creativities Project, the Merriweather District AIR (Columbia, MD) and 77Arts (Rutland, VT), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), and 40th Street AIR (Philadelphia, PA). In 2013 Smith was the recipient of the Bremen International Student Fellowship at the University of Bremen.

Sarah’s sculptural, installation and photo-based work, most recently appears at Waller Gallery (2020). Dr. Smith has also shown at the Arlington Art Center and DCAC (2019), the Borland Project Space, and Gallery CA (2018), Lab Bodies Performance Art Review (2017), Mambu Badu’s, a Photography Collective of African Diaspora Women, self-titled issue (2013) and in the twenty-year retrospective of Sistagraphy: A Different Eye, Celebrating 20 Years of Photography (2014), an Atlanta based photography collective of African American women.

They hold a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College, and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College. Dr. Smith lectures on gender and visual culture, Black and transnational feminisms, and Black art and culture. Previously Sarah was a Post-doctoral Fellow of Academic Diversity at American University 2018-2020, and a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Africana Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University in 2016.

Dr. Smith has published in The Black Scholar Journal, Women & Performance, Drain Journal of Art and Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts Education and in Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing and several catalogues for contemporary artists. Contact them here.