Dr. SA Smythe

Dr. SA Smythe is a critical theorist, artist, and educator who studies cultural responses to border regimes, belonging, racial capitalism, and colonial gender oppression within genealogies of radical Black, trans, and migrant livingness. Formerly Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies and Trans Poetics at UCLA, Smythe has worked as Assistant Professor of Black Studies and the Archive in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information since 2022. There, they also serve as founding director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis, Affiliated Faculty in the Women’s & Gender Studies Institute, and as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. Smythe is the editor of Transnational Black Studies (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press) and the special issue Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity for Postmodern Culture. They are the author of the forthcoming monograph, Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean and the poetry collection and sound art installation, /proclivity/. Smythe’s transmedia art and performance have been featured in collaborative and solo exhibitions, installations, poetry anthologies, and festivals, most recently or forthcoming at the Blackwood Gallery, the Art Gallery of York University, FADO Performance Art Centre, the Bell Gallery and Brown Arts Institute, Palazzino indiano arte (Florence), and the Mattatoio Museum (Rome). Recipient of the 2022 Rome Prize, Smythe is currently based between Tkaronto, Rome, and occupied Tongva land.

< Back