Kylee C. Smith is an artist-scholar who studies Black dance theory, with a particular focus on Southern Black women’s bodies as archive and dance as ritual. Her current research explores a danced ritual practice which allows her and collaborators to commune with their ancestors to create space for their grief and to (re)imagine alternate futures for coming generations. She is a Black feminist archivist who works across multiple mediums to consider archive as a living, multi-temporal research site which presents rich possibilities for Black women’s survival. In 2022, she completed her Masters of Fine Arts in Dance from The Ohio State University where she also graduated Summa Cum Laude with Distinction with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Creative Writing in 2017.