Born Dianne Patricia Goldson, Smith was raised in the South Bronx by parents who had immigrated to the US in the 1960s from Belize. Smith initially pursued a career in fashion, earning degrees in fashion design at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College and the Otis College of Art and Design in the early 1980s, then working as a runway model in Europe and Africa. Shifting her focus to art in the mid-1990s, Smith went on to earn her MFA in creative practice from the Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany, in 2012.

Smith explored painting during the first years of her art career, gradually shifting from figurative to abstract forms of expression. Today, however, she embraces a free-form, conceptual art practice. She uses a variety of mediums to explore experiences from her own life, encompassing installations focused on the trauma of domestic abuse, textile-based sculptures that recall memories of her Belizean grandmother, and photographs that plumb the history of her surroundings.