Culture, connection and futures otherwise.

Strategy · Innovation · Cultural Inquiry · Participatory Design

Hi, I'm Zaisha Smith. A research, design and cultural practitioner working at the intersection of community, culture and social change.

My practice brings together cultural inquiry, creativity, strategy and design to imagine futures otherwise, and to explore the social, cultural, political and systemic infrastructure through which those futures might be brought into being.

Alongside this, my work is expanding to explore Afro-Indigenous and diasporic arts and ontologies as technologies for repairing connection — to self, community, land and ancestry — and constructing a world on different terms.

In thinking about what I wish to say through my work — and how I wish to say it — three threads have run across almost every paid and passion-driven project I've undertaken. When I think about what matters most to me, these things have remained consistent for as long as I can remember. It feels true, now, to call them constants.

Connection

Repairing connection to self (purpose, identity & expression), community, ancestry, land and possibility is, to me, foundational to imagining and building worlds we wish to belong to.

Culture

Cultural arts are a technology for connection, a call to togetherness, and a way of imagining, remembering and rehearsing worlds we’ve never lived in

Change

Imagining different worlds is only part of the work. I’m interested in the social, cultural, political and systemic infrastructure that determines what becomes possible — and how strategy, design and collective action can help us build differently.

LEARN MORE ABOUT
THE CONSTANTS IN 
MY WORK
A selection of my professional and personal work that showcases my practice across connection, culture and change.
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