Terri C Smith

Terri C. Smith is a curator, writer, and professor who has developed innovative, critically recognized contemporary art exhibitions and programs that foreground sociopolitical themes and conceptual art practices. She has curated over 100 contemporary art exhibitions, receiving three, multi-year grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among other awards. Smith's exhibitions have been featured in publications such as Art Papers, Artforum, Bomb blog, and The Brooklyn Rail. After thirteen years as a contemporary art curator in Nashville, TN, Smith earned her MA from Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies (2008). Following stints curating at Connecticut's Westport Art Center and the Housatonic Museum of Art, she became the founding Creative Director of Franklin Street Works, an award-winning, not-for-profit contemporary space in Stamford, Connecticut, where she led that organization's exhibition programming from 2011 until it closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. She is currently working as a freelance curator, editor, and arts writer as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut. Her most recent exhibitions are: Tubular Times: Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993 at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT); and our constellations: astral embraces and tactual consciousness at Emerson Dorsch Gallery (Miami, FL). Purchase College Library has acquired and is currently organizing FSW's archive, so it can be a resource for future scholars, artists, and curators.