Kathryn Smith

Presenter

Kathryn Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and forensic facial imaging specialist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her hybrid practice brings art and applied science together through twinned interests in re-mediation and the curatorial, directed at a critical interrogation of knowledge systems. Her forensic and curatorial work come together as dual expressions of critical care for bodies, infrastructures and non-human things, directed at mutual visibility and legibility. She advocates for vital pracademic exchange between operational, institutional and research environments, preferring dialogical modes of working that prioritise orientations and particularities of site, with a special interest in re-mediation.

She has exhibited, lectured and published extensively, most recently several invited seminars and workshops (2016-2019) for the Glasgow School of Art/University of Glasgow’s MPhil in Curatorial Practices; Pitt Rivers Museum Seminar in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology, University of Oxford; Department of History, University of Liverpool; the Centre for Translating Cultures, University of Exeter; the Royal College of Art, and the Institute for Advanced Studies, UCL. Recent writing has appeared in Leonardo, Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, The Conversation (2016 and 2019), and the anthologies Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice No. 1; Approaching Facial Difference Past and Present (Bloomsbury) and Chemical Bodies: The Techno-Politics of Control (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Her doctoral research, conducted in Face Lab at LJMU, contributes to a repositioning of post-mortem Forensic Art practices in relation to forensic humanitarian discourse and historical restitution initiatives, informed by participant-observer fieldwork and operational reviews conducted with over seventy participants in ten countries. She has also contributed to Face Lab’s extensive forensic and archaeological casework portfolio, and co-designed the LJMU Art in Science Masters programme which launched in 2016.

Awards and grants include a National Geographic Explorer Award (2019-2020); an ESRC Institutional Impact Award (2016); an NRF Emerging Researcher/Scarce Skills schoalarship (2016-2019); a Chevening scholarship (2012-2013); an Oppenheimer Memorial Trust scholarship (2012-2013); the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship (2005); the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for visual art (2004) and the Sasol New Signatures award (1999).