Honor Ford-Smith

Honor Ford-Smith is Associate Professor Emeritus in Cultural and Artistic Practices for Environmental and Social Justice at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto.

Ford-Smith was born in Montreal to a Jamaican parent and returned to Jamaica at 3 months old and raised by her Jamaican family in Kingston, Jamaica. She came to voice in the context of the Caribbean social movements of the 1970s devising an approach to performance that focuses on community based, socially engaged, collaboration and that stresses testimony, autobiography, ceremonial and ritual structures.

As founding Artistic Director of the Sistren Theatre Collective in Jamaica, an early Black and Caribbean feminist organization she co-authored and edited “Lionheart Gal: Life stories of Jamaican Women,” (with Sistren) Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. In Sistren, working-class Jamaican women used participatory popular theatre to give voice to their experiences of oppression. It was a trailblazing application of participatory theater as an approach to knowledge creation.

She has produced, co-created, taught, directed and acted in numerous plays and performance interventions.

As a scholar she has researched and taught on decolonization, performance and social movements in the Caribbean and its diaspora. She has taught mentored many young scholars and artists and published numerous scholarly articles on this topic.

Her performance cycle “Letters from the Dead” was staged between 2008-2018 in Kingston Jamaica, Canada, the US, and Colombia. “Letters” manifests as street intervention, performance installation, and monodrama and it commemorates in various forms those who have died as a result of state violence and the violence of armed strong men in the Caribbean and its diaspora.

Currently she is Artist in Residence at the School of Drama, Edna Manley College where she is working on a project called “Memory, my city, my home”. Her publications include “3 Jamaican Plays” Kingston, Jamaica, Paul Issa Publications; and “My Mother’s Last Dance” an anthology of poems available through the University of Toronto Press.