Specialization:
Areas of Concentration: Twentieth-century American Art, Craft, and Material Culture; the Relationship Between Race and Modernism; Histories of Folk and Self-Taught Art; Artist-Built Environments; Artists' Homes, Studios, and Gardens; Exhibition Histories
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
Committee Members: Laurie Monahan, Jeffrey Stewart (Black Studies, UCSB), Katherine Jentleson (Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, High Museum of Art)
Dissertation: “Build/Live/Work: Artist-Built Environments and the Expanded Vernacular in the Twentieth Century”
M.A. Thesis: "Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and the Collapse of 'Surrealist Photography'" (Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, completed 2016)
Bio:
Elizabeth D. Smith specializes in American art, craft, and material culture of the twentieth century. Her dissertation, “Build/Live/Work: Artist-Built Environments and the Expanded Vernacular in the Twentieth Century,” examines four artists who built combination home and studio sites alongside new and expanding transportation infrastructure. At mid-century, many environment builders responded to emerging forms of mobility and their effects, simultaneously navigating the pressures of gentrification, the 1956 Federal Highway Act's roadway and waterway expansion projects, a burgeoning folk art tourism industry, and liberation movements across the United States.
Her dissertation is supported by a 2022-23 Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a 2023-24 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, and a 2024-26 Wyeth Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art.
Before coming to UCSB, Elizabeth held the position of Zvi Grunberg Resident Fellow at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut, where she organized exhibitions and managed the museum’s public programs. She received her M.A. degree from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.
Publications:
“Roadside California: Tressa Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, Theme Parks,and Art Tourism in the Golden State 
,” in “Reconsidering Art and Travel in America” (In the Round), ed. David Smucker, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 9, no. 2 (Fall 2023).
Review of Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw, Museum of Modern Art, New York , Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 1 (Spring 2022).