Kaitlyn Jo Smith

Kaitlyn Jo Smith’s interdisciplinary studio practice investigates the socioeconomic impact of emerging technologies on America’s working class. Through her work, Smith pays homage to laborers by revealing the ways technology renders invisible the labor that produces it. Informed by her upbringing in rural Ohio, Smith’s practice explores the intersections of work and worship, as well as the ways individuals are conditioned into lives of monotony. By combining traditional photographic processes with emerging technologies, she interrogates the authority of algorithms while fostering dialogue around humanity’s evolving relationship to labor, automation, and technological progress.

Smith’s projects have been shown nationally and internationally. She is the 2023 recipient of the Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship in Studio Art, was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London), and received the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. Smith has been featured in PDNedu, Art IDEAL, and Al-Tiba9 Magazine. She has presented her work at FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science & Technology, Technarte International Conference on Art and Technology, and Homecoming, Society for Photographic Education Annual National Conference.