Cauleen Smith

Filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith explored issues of African-American culture, gender and identity through a diverse array of medium, from art installations and performance to award-winning feature films like "Drylongso" (1998). Born September 25, 1967 in Riverside, California, her initial interest was classical cello, and she attended Chapman University on a music scholarship. While there, she discovered that her true calling lay in film, and transferred to San Francisco State University. There, she completed several student films before earning her Bachelors degree in cinema in 1991. The following year, Smith was accepted into the Masters program at the University of California Los Angeles, where in the second year of the program, she began work on a feature-length project. The completed project, "Drylongso," commented on male and female identities within the African-American community, and was a critical hit on the festival circuit, netting Smith the Someone to Watch Award from the Independent Spirit Awards in 2000, among many other laurels. She followed this breakout project with an array of experimental projects in a variety of mediums, from 2006's "I Want to See My Skirt," a collaboration with poet Aaron Van Jordan which incorporated multichannel video and sculpture, to the MiniDV short "Not the Black" (2009). Much of this work was completed during consecutive residences at several Chicago-area art facilities, including Threewalls and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. While there, Smith delved deeply into the city's Afrofuturism movement, which explored past and present issues for people of color through a complex aesthetic that combined elements science fiction, history, culture and fantasy. Her contributions to the movement included the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band, a joint effort between two area marching bands and drill teams that performed flash mob-style routines set to avant-garde jazz artist Sun Ra's music throughout the city. Sun Ra also informed one of Smith's most ambitious projects, "17," a meditation on the mythological connotations of the titular number that featured 260 feet of hand-printed wallpaper installed at the Hyde Park Art Center and at a street corner on the city's South Side. For these and other efforts, Smith received numerous awards, including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award and the 2016 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.