Lydia Smith (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Columbus, OH. Her practice focuses on the archive as a phenomenological site for understanding the remnants of the past and its links to our cultural understanding of death, time, and place. Smith received an MFA from The Ohio State University and a BA from Rice University. She directed Rice’s Matchbox Gallery (2013-2015) and was a member of the artist-run curatorial collective AUTOMAT in Philadelphia, PA (2018-2023). Curatorial projects include The Third Body, a two-part exhibition co-curated with Addison Namnoum, and Office Hours, an experimental collaborative exhibition about higher education.
Smith has completed residencies at The Visual Studies Workshop, Columbus Printed Arts Center, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and Denmark Arts Center. In 2015, she was awarded a Watson Fellowship to spend a year traveling outside of the United States to research how the landscape of burial sites reflects cultural attitudes toward death. She was awarded an Ohio State University Fellowship in 2019 and a Global Arts + Humanities Graduate Team Fellowship in 2022. Exhibitions include The Neon Heater, Ortega y Gasset Projects, the Hiestand Galleries at Miami University, the BioScience Research Collaborative at Rice University, Icebox Project Space, Roy G Biv, and Urban Arts Space, Ohio State Libraries, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bubenska 1 inPrague, CZ, and the City of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt.