Filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith makes work that reveals a nuanced tension between experimental and traditional narrative forms. Creating a language for the fallen, fragile, flawed and fugitive, she has turned her gaze on the bodies of black women, the emotional lives of crows, the neglected lakefront of the southside of Chicago, and a neighborhood in New Orleans that may never return. She proposes speculative narratives, visionary interpretations of racialized experience, sometimes purposefully layers asynchronous sound and even employs lenses that render an altered perception to viewers, all ways to defamiliarize the familiar.  She questions identity, politics, emotion, physicality, beauty, and technology. The cosmos is her terrain.