Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media. He lives in Harlem, New York.
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 Grantee, a CatchLight Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee and an AmDOC/POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.
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 the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), at America House in Kyiv Ukraine) and in the Bole section of Addis Ababa Ethiopia, among others. His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. His work has also been featured at the Sheffield Doc Fest, the TriBeca Film Festival and the L.A. Film Festival.
He has also created a series of public art projects with organizations such as Columbia University, the NYC Parks Department, the Hartford YMCA, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Amistad Center, The Laundromat Project, and The California Judicial Council. His work has been published in numerous media publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, PBS, National Geographic Learning, Facing History Facing & Ourselves, 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, Bayeté is a faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He also 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.