Bayeté Ross Smith

Bayeté Ross Smith is an multidisciplinary artist, visual journalist, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media. He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, an Art For Justice Fund Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee, a POV NY Times embedded mediamaker and CatchLight Global Fellow.

His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with Paris Photo (France), the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), with the U.S. Department of state in South Africa, and America House in (Ukraine), among others. His work has been featured at Lincoln Center, the Sheffield Doc Fest, the March on Washington Film Festival and the L.A. Film Festival and has been an official selection for the Sundance Film Festival twice.

He has also created a series of public art projects with organizations such as the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Amistad Center, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, the Hartford YMCA, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and The California Judicial Council. His work has been published in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, Question Bridge: Black Males in America (2015), Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Black: A Celebration of A Culture (2005), The Spirit Of Family (2002) and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté helped launch and continues to work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a hospital and school based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY that partners with Kings County Hospital. He is also a faculty member at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.