SA Smythe is a blktrans nonbinary theorist, multi-instrumentalist, transmedia storyteller, and educator currently based in Tkaronto and Rome. Smythe’s antecartographic practice conjures black belonging and is concerned with the thrival of our relations beyond every border. They weave blktrans poetics, performance, light sculptures, sound composition, photography, and found footage/archival ephemera. Smythe’s transmedia work has been featured internationally in collaborative and solo performance exhibitions, film and multimedia installations, poetry anthologies, and in literary and performance festivals. Recent presentations and artist/composer residencies include Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre in Toronto; Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Canada); Villa Lena Foundation (Tuscany); VCCA (USA); BASE (Milan); Bell Gallery (Brown Arts Institute); Berkeley Arts Centre (Berkeley); The Recovery Plan and Palazzino indiano arte/CANGO in Florence; GXRLSCHOOL (Los Angeles); Kampnagel (Hamburg); Africa Writes Literary Festival (coheadliner, London); Mattatoio Museum (Rome); and The Church (New York). They were a 2023-24 MacDowell Fellow in Multimedia Installation and recipient of the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies. SA Smythe is 1/2 of multiscalar performance collective THEYFxRST. They are Assistant Professor of Black Studies & the Archive at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where they direct the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis. [200 words]
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Writer, Artist, and Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA
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