Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche Nation) is an author, essayist, and curator. His projects focus on the contemporary landscape of American Indian politics and culture. 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 (with Robert Warrior) of Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, and Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong. University of Minnesota Press will publish his third book of essays next year. He has lectured at the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. He delivered the 2017 Distinguished Critic Lecture by the Association of International Art Critics-USA and received the Tony Horwitz Prize from the Society of American Historians in 2024. Smith lives in Baltimore.

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