Bayeté Ross Smith is an multidisciplinary artist, visual journalist, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media.
He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Speaker, a Creative Capital Awardee, a CatchLight Global Fellow, an Art For Justice Fund Grantee Partner, a BPMPlus Grantee, and a POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.
His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with Paris Photo (France), the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), with the U.S. Department of state in South Africa, and America House in (Ukraine), among others. His work has been featured at Lincoln Center, the Sheffield Doc Fest, the March on Washington Film Festival and the L.A. Film Festival. His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively.
He has created public art projects with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Paris Photo Festival, the Photo Saint Germain Festival, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Dysturb, the City of White Plains NY, The Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia, NE Sculpture, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the Jerome Foundation, the Hartford YMCA, The California Judicial Council and Columbia Law School. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, PBS, Facing History & Ourselves, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer, in addition to books such as Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009).
In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté is also and board member of Project Implicit at Harvard and Self Evident Education.