Laura Smith is Director of Collection and Exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield, where she has curated exhibitions of the work of Helen Chadwick (2025), Sylvia Snowden (2024), Igshaan Adams (2024) and Andrew Cranston (2023). She was previously curator at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Tate. At Whitechapel her exhibitions included: Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70 (2023), Emma Talbot: The Age (2022), Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy (2021), Simone Fattal: Finding a Way (2021) and Helen Cammock: Che si può fare? (2019). At Tate she curated exhibitions of Claude Cahun, Barbara Hepworth, Linder, Liliane Lijn, France-Lise McGurn, Lucy Stein and Rebecca Warren, and group shows including Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings and the Turner Prize 2016. Smith writes extensively on modern and contemporary art, recently contributing chapters to Revisiting Modern British Art (2022) and The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf (2021), as well as monographs on Judith Godwin, Pia Arke, Lisa Brice, Lewis Hammond, Sylvia Snowden and Caragh Thuring.
