Bio

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche author, essayist, and curator. His work explores the contemporary landscape of American, and American Indian art and politics. From 2001 to June 2025, Smith served as curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Exhibitions include Americans, James Luna’s Emendatio, Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, and Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort. He is the author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (2009) and Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (1996, with Robert Warrior).
In 2017, Smith was selected to deliver the Eleventh Distinguished Critic Lecture by the Association of International Art Critics – USA. He toured New Zealand in 2023 as a representative of the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program. The Society of American Historians awarded Smith the 2024 Tony Horwitz Prize for “distinguished work in American History of wide appeal and enduring significance.” In 2025 he won the Rabkin Prize for visual arts journalism.
Smith lives in Baltimore.