Emily Smith is a professor of design, a dancer, and an exhibition-maker based in Berlin, Germany. Her transdisciplinary practice incorporates ethnographic, embodied, and participatory frameworks.

Over the past twenty years, her work has taken form in exhibitions, seminars, publications, and workshops. This interdisciplinary expertise converges in large-scale projects such as the co-artistic direction of the Fikra Graphic Design Biennial Ministry of Graphic Design (2018), the first graphic design biennial in the Middle East / North Africa region. The exhibition received widespread press in publications including AIGA Eye on Design, PRINT magazine, Vogue Arabia, Wallpaper*, and others. Smith’s essay “A Three-Hour Tour: Towards a Working Methodology for Responsive Curating” in Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (MIT Press 2019) articulates her approach to curating beyond conventional frames.

Currently, Smith is a design professor at the UE University of Europe Applied Sciences in Berlin. Previously she served as Vice Dean of the Art & Design Faculty and as program director of MA Media Spaces (New Media Design) & BA Communication Design. In parallel, she continues to lecture and teach in design, curating, anthropology, and architecture contexts throughout Europe and the US.

Smith completed an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin, a BFA in Graphic Design and Time-Based Media from Art Center College of Design, and a BA in Latin American Studies from Pitzer College.