Juliana Irene Smith is an artist focusing on “human desperation” and the “politics of belonging.” She has a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in New York and a Masters in Public Art from the University of Applied Arts and Sciences in Lucerne, Switzerland. She did a semester during her Masters at Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg. There she co-founded “Kazoo- it’s a live art thing,” with Anthea Moys and had a premier event and exhibition at the Premises Gallery. She also co-curated with Moys, the Armed Response exhibition for the Goethe Institut in Johannesburg. Awards include, a residency at the Qattan Foundation, Masters Grant in Arts and Design from IKEA, Language grant from the Goethe Institute and a travel grant from Pro Helvetia. She has participated in three Triangle Arts Workshops, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. She is fluent in German and currently learning Arabic. She worked as the director’s assistant for Kunsthalle Winterthur in Switzerland and was Salwa Mikdadi’s assistant for the Palestinian collateral event for the 53rd Venice Biennale. She exhibited at the Central Switzerland Annual Exhibition at the Museum of Art Lucerne, RIWAQ Biennale in Bir Zeit, Palestine, Beneholz Space for Contemporary Art, Dienstgebaude Project Space, and K3 Project Space in Zurich and in the Young Swiss Artists exhibition, Why We Worry at Gallery Supernova in Riga, Latvia. In 2010 she was selected to participate in the Mobile Artistic Platform in India with Reloading Images and in 2011 she was selected as a participant for ART OMI in New York. Her latest performance Pathetic Looser was part of the /sin/ Video and Performance Art Festival with Qattan Foundation in Ramallah and Jerusalem. She was a guest curator at Makan Art Space in Amman in 2010 with the public art exhibition Utopian Airport Lounge. She teaches photography and video at the UNRWA vocational college in Ramallah and curatorial studies at Dar Annadwa in Bethlehem.