Cauleen Smith joins the faculty of UCLA’s Department of Art
UCLA Arts welcomes a new member to the faculty of the Department of Art: professor Cauleen Smith
I am pleased to announce that Cauleen Smith has been appointed professor in the Department of Art, effective retroactively to July 2022.
Cauleen Smith, a filmmaker and multimedia artist, describes her work as a reflection on “the everyday possibilities of the imagination.” Smith’s work explores social, cultural, intellectual, artistic, and political liberation in order to conjure what she has called “a cornucopia of future histories.” Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Her images incorporate science fiction, the Black diaspora, and the lyrical potential of landscape. Her work also explores site-specificity and engages in social activism.
She has had solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art Pennsylvania, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and a two person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith’s films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Prospect 4 New Orleans, Studio Museum Harlem, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the New Museum in New York, and BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK.
Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the United States Artists Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film/Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, a Rauschenberg Residency, and Smith was an artist in residence at Artpace.
Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She holds a bachelor’s in creative arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. She first gained national attention with her feature-length film Drylongso (1998), which she completed during her graduate studies at UCLA. Smith has also been a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a faculty member of California Institute of the Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.
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