About

Lauren Dana Smith (b. 1979, Philadelphia) is an artist, writer and art psychotherapist living in Taos, New Mexico. Smith’s multidisciplinary practice utilizes sculptural, digital, video and sound compositions to process land and body politics through a feminist lens. Smith studied painting and received her B.A. from Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Smith is a faculty member at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she received her M.P.S. in Creative Arts Therapy and Creativity Development.

Smith’s work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally. In 2021 she received a SURFACE: Emerging Artist of New Mexico award from the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque. She has been recognized nationally for her digital art series. Her work has appeared in publications such as Hyperallergic, Art & Cake LA, New Visionary Magazine, ARTWALK magazine and the Santa Fe Literary Review. Smith has published and presented widely within the fields of psychotherapy, art therapy, traumatology, pediatrics and palliative medicine. Smith is a Co-Founder of the Taos Abstract Artist Collective.

Statement

Exploring rupture, repair and the climate of internal place, Lauren Dana Smith’s multidisciplinary practice represents the linkages between body, land, collective trauma and memory. 

Smith’s feminist approach tests the personal boundaries we choose and those we don't. Her sculptural painting series, digital objects, video/sound installations and writings forge inquiries into the impact of personal and collective trauma and transformative experience on the psyche. Each work considers the bodily experience of the land and the mirror it provides to us in times of calm and times of chaos.

Smith’s work ultimately invites a path through our intimate interior spaces and along the exterior boundaries of physical form. At play is a steady tension between our inner landscapes and outer environments.

Interested in honoring the depth and narrative of the American Southwest and its parallels to personal and ancestral memory through a contemporary lens, Smith’s work analyzes color, texture, climate and existential presence in a departure from the familiar iconography of traditional Southwestern art.