T'ai Smith

T’ai Smith has been an Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century Art at University of British Columbia since 2012. Having studied visual arts / art history at Barnard College, Columbia University as well as visual and cultural studies / art history at University of Rochester, Smith received a graduate scholarship from the DAAD for Ph.D. research at Humboldt Universität Berlin. She gained her doctorate at University of Rochester in 2006 for her dissertation entitled “Weaving Work at the Bauhaus: The Gender and Engendering of a Medium, 1919-1937”. Before joining the University of British Columbia, Smith taught at Parsons The New School for Design and Maryland Institute College of Art. Apart from her academic appointments, she was Managing Editor of Grey Room, published by MIT Press, from 2004 to 2008. Smith has published several articles on modern and contemporary art and design in periodicals such as Art Journal, Journal of Modern Craft or Texte zur Kunst. Since 2010, she has been an advisory board member of InVisible Culture. Additionally, Smith continuously writes catalogue essays for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Smith currently traces two book projects: “Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design”, a study on textile theory and its development in the mid-twentieth century, which will be published in 2014. Her second research project, provisionally entitled “Textile Media and Philosophy”, focuses on the use of textile structures and methods as metaphors in discourses such as art history, media studies or philosophy.