Terence (Terry) Smith is an eminent historian of modern art, a leading critic of contemporary art, a prominent analyst of curatorial practice, and a pioneering critical theorist of contemporaneity. His books Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (1993), What is Contemporary Art? ( 2009), Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), and Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, edited with Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (2008) are widely regarded as landmarks in each of these fields. The Architecture of Aftermath (2006), Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (2019) and Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images (2022) have established him as a leading interpreter of contemporary visual cultures.
A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1996, he is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney and Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. As well, he is also a Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School; Professor at Large, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah; and Faculty at Large in the Curatorial Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2010, he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). In 2022, the CAA conferred on him its Distinguished Teacher of Art History Award.
His books other than those mentioned above include Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011); Talking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2015); The Contemporary Composition (Sternberg Press, 2016); One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke University Press, 2017); Curating the Complex & The Open Strike (Sternberg and MIT Press, 2021); and, with Fred R. Myers, Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation (Duke University Press, 2024).
A founding board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He is currently a Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and a member of the Advisory Board of the Biennial Foundation in New York.
Among his current projects is the editing of Okwui Enwezor, Selected Writings, vol. 1, Towards a New African Art Discourse, and vol. 2, Curating the Postcolonial Condition, to be published by Duke University Press in mid-2025.