I am an artist and anthropologist with an interdisciplinary PhD from University of Victoria, Canada. Over the past 15 years I have explored relationships between photography as object, image and event, through installation, performance, and in academic research and writing.

My artistic and academic practices are platforms to address the significance of photography by breaking it down to its fundamental properties in order to propose new forms of subjectivity and collectivity. My work explores the way that places like National Parks are maintained through photography; the relationships between archives and photography; and the structure of artworlds as a complex of people, funding, studios and materials.

My writing and photo-essay work has been published in journals such as Visual Anthropology, Anthropologica, and Imaginations Journal. My artworks have been installed in locations across North America, most recently as a part of Imagine Our Parks and my work has shown in venues such as Open Space Gallery, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and Arts Incubator.

I was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow from 2010-2013; and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholar from 2005-2008. I recently received funding from the British Columbia Arts Council (2016) for the project Furtive and have been artist-in-residence at University of Utah Honors College (2013) and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society at UVic (2015).

Since 2009, I have worked with the award-winning collective, Ethnographic Terminalia, curating exhibitions at intersections of art and anthropology.

As artist-in-residence in the Making Culture Lab I will work with Kate to investigate the role of the anarchival materiality within archives.

You can find out more about me at trudilynnsmith.com