Christen Ann Smith is an accomplished Black female anthropologist who focuses on anti-Black violence and giving Black women recognition in the academy. Dr. Smith is a graduate of Princeton University, as part of the class of 1999; she ended her time as a Princeton Tiger with a Bachelor of the Arts. She graduated from Stanford University four years later with her Master’s in the Arts of Cultural and Social Anthropology in 2003. A few years later, Smith continued her time as a Stanford Tree for the next four years and officially became Dr. Smith after finishing her Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford in 2007, with her dissertation, “Acting Out: Theater and the Politics of Citizenship at the Periphery in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil,” was published.  

Smith has had many notable accomplishments throughout her career and continues to contribute to the anthropology community. One of her efforts has been the Cite Black Women collective,  which Smith founded in 2017. This collective is a team that strives to credit Black Women. She started this movement after attending a convention and seeing her work plagiarized during an academic convention. While this was incredibly frustrating to Smith, it also was the inspiration for the #CiteBlackWomen movement. Smith uses the Twitter handle @profsassy to spread her message and communicate her more personal thoughts. Her other Twitter @CiteBlackWomen, draws more attention to the collective, spreads the word to #CiteBlackWomen, and breaks down the Cite Black Women podcast. This bi-weekly podcast focuses on the politics, ideas, and intellectual contributions Black Women have made to. @CiteBlackWomen also has an Instagram and a Facebook, these two social media handles are used to shine a light onto different Black Women who have contributed to the larger intellectual conversation.

 Smith remains dedicated to ending anti-Black genocide around the world. Her work now focuses on the gendered information around anti-Black violence in the Americas and Brazil. In Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil, Smith focuses on, examines, and exposes the anti-black violence experienced in Brazil through authoritarian leadership through the lens of performance concerning the long-term violence Black families feel. She continues to research police and state-led violence in Brazil and the United States, though looking at the sorrows that encompass Black motherhood. Smith’s ethnographic work peels back the layers of systemic violence and racism that kill Black children and how this affects Black mothers. She also has several other works published in Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, and Transforming Anthropology, along with interviews for the Huffington Post and National Public Radio (NPR). 

Smith is an associate professor of Anthropology and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas Austin and the director of the University of Texas Austin’s Center of Women and Gender Studies. She is currently working on a sequel to Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil and researching more theories on the impact of authoritarian violence. This book, Sequela: The Lingering, Deadly Impact of Police Violence on Black Communities, especially Women, also focuses on women in Brazil and the United States.