[25 words]: SA Smythe is a transmedia storyteller, multi-instrumentalist, critical theorist, and educator. Rooted in the Caribbean and Central America, they are primarily based between Tkarón:to and Italy. [Contact SA’s atelier]
SA Smythe is a critical theorist, multi-instrumentalist, and transmedia storyteller whose work conjures black belonging and thriving relations beyond borders. Rooted in this antecartographic practice, Smythe weaves together poetics, performance, interactive light sculptures, soundscape compositions, monoprints, and archival ephemera. Their transmedia works have been featured internationally in solo and collaborative performances, film and multimedia installations, poetry anthologies, and literary and performance festivals.
Recent presentations and residencies include the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art, Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, FADO Performance, and Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Canada); Villa Lena Foundation, BASE Milano, Mattatoio Museum, The Recovery Plan/BHMF, and Palazzino indiano arte/CANGO (Italy); the VCCA, Bell Gallery (Brown Arts Institute), Berkeley Arts Centre, GxRLSCHOOL (LA), and The Church (New York) (USA); Kampnagel Theatre (Germany); and Africa Writes Literary Festival (UK). Smythe is one-half of the performance collective THEYFxRST with Autumn Knight and the Panthers Trio with Maria Hupfield and Olivia Shortt. A 2023-24 MacDowell Fellow in Multimedia Installation and 2022 Rome Prize recipient for Modern Italian Studies, Smythe was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Creative Capital in Multimedia Performance. Smythe is editor of Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity (vols. 1&2) (Postmodern Culture), Transnational Black Studies (Liverpool University Press; forthcoming), and author of Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean (forthcoming) and [proclivity], a poetry collection and sound installation-performance suite. They currently work as Associate Professor of Black Studies & the Archive at the University of Toronto, where they direct the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis, a multidisciplinary hub and collaborative atelier dedicated to Black Studies research and aesthetic interventions. [265 words]
SA Smythe, PhD 