CR FASHION BOOK -- The multimedia artist first endeavored into film while she attended San Francisco State University. Though her early film projects drew attention to her talent, it was her first feature work, “Drylonso” — which began as her Master of Fine Arts thesis at UCLA — that premiered to Sundance acclaim in 1999, and truly put Smith on the map as a filmmaker and rising arts star. The film’s title references an African American expression for “same old” or “everyday,” touching on the idea of telling the day-to-day truths of our lives, which has since formed an ongoing thread in her work.
“As an artist, maybe I am more able to contribute to smaller scale, even mundane shifts,” says Smith. “My goal is to understand and express the things we all go through, even if we are very different people.”