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Two women standing and smiling in front of a framed painting in a gallery. One has curly gray hair, wearing a patterned skirt; the other has straight brown hair, wearing a sleeveless top.
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National Museum of Women in the Arts

Dianne Smith

A photograph of a woman in black and white. She has a medium skin tone and is wearing big, black glasses.

Dianne Smith, 2025; Photo by Dianne Smith

Born in 1965

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.

Artist Details

  • Name

    Dianne Smith

  • Birth

    South Bronx, New York, 1965

  • Phonetic Spelling

    die-an smith

Works by Dianne Smith

Another Sunday Outing, from the series “Between Harlem and Me”

Dianne Smith began taking photographs in the mid-1990s after relocating to Harlem. Moved to document the extraordinary, everyday beauty of this historically Black community, Smith gradually amassed an archive of images that she would later employ in her ongoing series “Between Harlem and Me” (2021 to present).

This series of photomontages combines Smith’s snapshots with archival images from New York’s...

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A medium-dark skinned adult woman wearing all black—a fur hat, sunglasses, boots, and a long, voluminous coat—walks on a sidewalk toward the viewer. Black-and-white images of people and urban buildings are layered over the woman.

Dianne Smith, Another Sunday Outing, from the series “Between Harlem and Me,” 2021; Archival digital pigment print, 20 x 20 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the artist; © Dianne Smith