She is best known for her feature film Drylongso and her experimental works that address the African-American identity, specifically the issues facing black women today.

[5] Drylongso, shot during Smith's time in graduate school at UCLA, takes place in Oakland, CA and follows a young African-American woman named Pica on her quest to photograph what she believes to be the dying breed of African American men.

Throughout the film, Pica struggles to balance her project, her dysfunctional home life, and new friendships, all while a serial killer, whose victims include some of her own photography subjects, is terrorizing her neighborhood.

[7][8] Smith's site-specific installation, "17," ran from March 10, 2013, to July 7, 2013, both at the Hyde Park Art Center and on the corner of East Garfield Boulevard and Prairie Avenue on the South Side.

The title of this exhibition materialized from Smith's "meditations on the number’s spiritual significance as a marker of immortality"[9] and further alludes to numerous aspects of art and culture spanning from ancient history to modern day.

[16] The description of the exhibit reads, "Through films, objects, and installation, Give It or Leave It offers an emotional axis by which to navigate four distinct universes: Alice Coltrane and her ashram, a 1966 photo shoot by Bill Ray at Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Noah Purifoy and his desert assemblages, and black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson and her Shaker community.

[16] Smith exhibited her ongoing multimedia work, Black Utopia LP, as a part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019.

[18] Marking Smith's entrance onto the Chicago art scene was her work in creating the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band Project, the yield from her residency with Threewalls.

Composed of members of the Rich South High School (Richton Park, Illinois) marching band and occasionally the South Shore Drill Team as well, the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band descended like a flash mob on various parts of Chicago that had been hit with waves of youth violence, including Chinatown and the meatpacking district, a few times throughout the fall of 2010, playing and dancing to an orchestration of Sun Ra's "Space is the Place" led by music director Y. L. Douglas.

Smith coupled the militant undertones of marching bands with the Sun Ra-style of free jazz in an attempt to combat youth violence with music.

[19] Smith is a player in the movement of Afrofuturism, an emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past.

Afrofuturism, for me, is about speculating on the potentiality of what is known about technology and physics to create metaphors that allow me to explore an African diasporic past and generate possible narratives for the future.