Adam James Smith is an award-winning, British-American filmmaker, anthropologist, and educator. He holds degrees from Stanford and Cambridge, the latter of which he is currently an affiliated filmmaker at the university’s Visual Anthropology Lab.
His work explores identity and migration across China’s rapidly changing rural and urban landscapes. His debut feature, The Land of Many Palaces (2015), co-directed with Song Ting, follows farmers relocating to the “ghost city” of Ordos and their struggle to adapt to urban life. His second film and first solo-feature, Americaville (2020), unveils a Chinese replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the lives of residents chasing their vision of the American Dream. His upcoming projects include Nighthawk, set in Shenzhen’s vast art factory, where a lonely painter shaped by Edward Hopper’s imagery wanders the night in search of connection, and In the Valley of Solace, about a young woman living alone and off-the-land in a remote Yunnan valley. Adam’s film work has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Art Forum, and The New York Times.
Adam is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of The Explorers Club in New York City. He splits his time between the Hudson Valley, New York; Cambridge, England; and Hokuto, Yamanashi, Japan.
