Mona Smith

Grants and Research Manager

Mona Z. Smith comes to HVSF with 18 years of arts administration experience in New York City. Most recently, she served as executive director of  ETHEL's Foundation for the Arts, supporting the creation and performance of contemporary concert music. Prior to that, she was executive director of Performing Arts at Kingsborough/CUNY. From 2000-2006, she was manager of adult programs at the Brooklyn Museum, where she curated First Saturdays, tripling attendance at this groundbreaking outreach series that now serves a model for arts institutions across the country.

Smith is also a writer. She started her career in newspapers, reporting on crime for The Miami Herald. Her book Becoming Something (Farrar Straus & Giroux) is a biography of Canada Lee, the gifted black athlete, actor, and activist, who was a tragic victim of the McCarthy-era blacklist. The book's publication followed the production of Smith's play about Mr. Lee, also titled Becoming Something. Smith has written five other plays that have been produced in New York and Los Angeles. Her newest work is All That Remains, about a unit of Japanese-American soldiers who served in World War II, based on 20 years of research and is inspired by the ghost-warrior plays of traditional Japanese Noh theatre. Smith has a BA in journalism from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and an MFA in theatre arts from Columbia University. 

You may contact Mona through email at msmith@hvshakespeare.org