Cauleen Smith

About

Cauleen Smith is an American filmmaker, multimedia artist, and professor known for her interdisciplinary work rooted in experimental film, Afrofuturism, and explorations of African diaspora culture, Black feminist themes, and speculative utopias. Born in Riverside, California, on September 25, 1967, she grew up in Riverside and Sacramento, earning a BA in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 1991 and an MFA in Filmmaking from UCLA in 1998. Her early films, including the shorts Daily Rains (1990) and Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (1992), and her debut feature Drylongso (1998), which premiered at Sundance and received a 4K restoration by Criterion Collection in 2023, established her reputation. Smith's practice spans film, installations, sculptures, textiles, and performances, engaging non-Western cosmologies, Afrofuturist narratives inspired by figures like Sun Ra and John Coltrane, post-Katrina New Orleans, Black feminist literature, and themes of the fragile, forgotten, flawed, and fugitive.[1][2][3][5][6][8]

Afrofuturist experimental multimedia exploring African diaspora, Black feminism, speculative utopias, and everyday imagination