Dr. Blair Ebony Smith

Blair Ebony Smith, PhD

Blair Ebony Smith is an artist-scholar and lover from Southside Richmond, Virginia. As a sound artist, DJ, and homegirl with Black girl celebratory collective/band, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) We Levitate, Blair deepened her love for Black sound, music and making space for Black girlhood celebration with Black girls. Her art and scholarship explore themes of memory, loops, home, coalition, everlasting love, and sound/listening. She uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to take on Black (girlhood) study.  Smith is the author of solo, co-written, and co-edited works in Wish to Live: Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader, An Outkast Reader:  Essays on Race, Gender and the Postmodern South, American Quarterly, and Visual Arts Research. She teaches classes focused on Black girl, femme, queer and feminist art, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening.

She is currently working on lovenloops: Time, Sound, Music, and Black Girlhood, an experimental book project centered on 4 thematic DJ mixes that explore the sounds, music, and digital creativity of Black girls and women engaged in creative and collective work of which she is a part. Recent exhibitions and curations include the Krannert Art Museum (Illinois) and the Luminary (St. Louis). She has performed as a DJ and sound artist with her bandmates across the nation at various institutions, and solo at Richmond Independent Radio, Institute of Contemporary Art VCU, Diggin in the Crates at Virginia Tech, and Slo’ Mo’ Queer Dance Party in Chicago, Illinois and more. Since 2014, She has composed sample-based sound art, beats, and loops under her alter ego, lovenloops released tracks on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, making music with lovers, friends, and homegirls.  She released her first project, Don’t Ever Forget It with Soulvember Records (2016) based in Los Angeles, CA.