Dr. Synatra Smith is an Afrofuturist cultural preservationist focused on the ways in which Black cultural landscapes transform access to special collections and archives through a Black speculative methodology that utilizes extended reality (XR) and other digital humanities tools. In her CLIR/DLF postdoctoral fellowship in data curation for African American Studies at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Temple University Libraries Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio (Scholars Studio), she recently launched a project entitled Sacred Geographic Superimpositions, which is a spiritual scholarly endeavor to document and celebrate ephemeral Black public art in Philadelphia in a manner that transports them into the ancestral plane of the “transformative archive” to bring scholarly research and data curation out of the academy into a curated space grounded in storytelling and interpretation through story mapping and augmented reality (AR). She also co-developed a mapping visualization entitled Philly Necrofutures to combine art historical research with data curation and visualization to address under-resourced Black collections at predominantly white institutions. Additionally, she has been researching Black artists in the collections of the PMA, the Temple University Libraries Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, and other local organizations to enhance their digital visibility through linked open data. 

Through her diligent work and commitment to professional excellence, she has been elevated to participate in several leadership opportunities within her institutions and beyond. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Advocates for Black Representation staff working group at the PMA and she is the primary mentor for the LEADING Fellows program at the Scholars Studio hosted through Drexel University. She has also served as a mentor for the Robert F. Smith internship program at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a co-editor of the Curated Futures Project: A Third Library Is Possible through the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the secretary for the Association of African American Museums (AAAM) Emerging Museum Professionals committee. Currently, she is in a AAAM working group to identify ways to build capacity for member institutions through traveling, shared, and collaborative exhibitions, and AAAM awarded her the 2022 Pace Setter award.

Outside of her postdoctoral fellowship, she has been consulting as a researcher for Association for the Study of African American Life and History to document 500 years of Black history in South Florida; the HBCU Library Alliance to explore the challenges and opportunities for member institutions to create access to their special collections and archives through digitization projects (see Appendix E for the executive summary of that internal report); and the Hyattsville Community Development Corporation to write a report contextualizing the historic use of racially restrictive deed covenants to uphold residential segregation in Hyattsville, Maryland. She recently joined the