Smith created two critically acclaimed short films as an undergraduate, Daily Rains (1990) and Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (1992), and produced her first narrative feature-length film, Drylongso (1998), while completing her MFA; the film was well received at many film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival. 

Smith has described the subjects of her work as “the fragile, the forgotten, the flawed, and the fugitive”1 and her practice foregrounds the richness of human complexities. Smith’s work has engaged topics such as the music and legacies of Sun Ra and John Coltrane, the politics of land art, and the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., and has centered on visual and phenomenological experiences that investigate cultural, intellectual, and artistic liberation. Other films weave together writings by Sojourner Truth and the Combahee River Collective with music by Alice Coltrane to reflect on transformation, memory, and Afrodiasporic histories. Her work shifts across a range of settings, from Shaker cemeteries in Watervliet, New York, to Chicago’s South Side, to the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

Smith earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Smith was the inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and has completed residences at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and ArtSpace. The Studio Museum awarded Smith the Alexander Joyce Wein Artist Prize in 2020 and has presented her work in exhibitions such as in VideoStudio: Changing Same (2010) and The Shadows Took Shape (2013).

1) Jareh Das, “Black, Feminist, Spiritual, and Alive: Cauleen Smith’s Give It or Leave It,” BOMB Magazine, December 6, 2018, bombmagazine.org/articles/black-feminist-spiritual-alive/.