Christen Smith is an associate professor of anthropology and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Smith’s research focuses on engendered anti-Black state violence and Black resistance in the Americas, particularly police violence and the transnational Black movement to end it. Her work in Brazil uses the lens of performance to examine the immediate and long-term impact of state violence on Black people and anti-violence organizing. Smith’s book Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016) explores the visual and performatory economies of the Black body in pain as an ironic transfer point for the production of Brazil’s racial state. Her more recent comparative work examines the lingering, deadly impact of police violence on black women in Brazil and the U.S.