Bio

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche author, essayist, and curator. His work explores the contemporary landscape of American Indian art and politics. He has published two books to wide acclaim and is currently working on a third volume.

Smith’s twenty-three-year tenure as a Smithsonian curator has spanned the development of the National Museum of the American Indian’s inaugural history exhibition, a string of popular and influential contemporary Native art shows, and 2018’s renowned Americans. He has lectured widely at museums and universities across the United States, as well as Copenhagen, Vancouver, Venice and Montreal. In 2017 he was invited to deliver delivered the Eleventh Annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at the New School in New York. In March 2023, he toured New Zealand as a representative of the US State Department’s Art in Embassies program. The Society of American Historians awarded Smith the 2024 Tony Horwitz Prize for “distinguished work in American History of wide appeal and enduring significance.”

Smith returned to his original vocation as an independent cultural critic in July 2025. He lives in Baltimore.