Born in Champaign, Illinois, 1991
Lives and works in New York, New York 

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William Jihrel Smith is a painter who incorporates scanned images, body impressions, photographs, charts, texts, and personal archives, often drawn from family history, lived experience, and daily life. His paintings are built through layering, printing, pouring, and spraying paint, combining traditional art-making processes with methods drawn from construction and industrial work. Images accumulate and are partially obscured, using the surface to hold multiple sources, materials, and references at once. Paintings function as sites of accumulation, storage, and redaction — where experience, material, and data converge to examine how images convey knowledge and truth.