Tieshka K. Smith is a photographer, and writer based in Philadelphia. Her work explores community, memory, and joy, capturing rituals, spaces, and stories that often go unseen. Anchored in visual storytelling, she integrates design research and community archiving to preserve cultural memory and foster connection. She is the author of Compositions of Black Joy: A Visual Chronicle of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival (2015–2022) and has exhibited nationally.

Since 2010, after transitioning from a career in nonprofit program evaluation and project management, my artistic practice has centered community engagement, collaborative storytelling, and uncovering histories that challenge dominant narratives. Grounded in lived experience, I use photography, writing, design research, and archival practice to explore how race, class, civic identity, and place intersect to shape belonging—and exclusion. My work reveals hidden stories, provokes reflection, and invites audiences to consider their own roles in upholding or disrupting social and cultural systems. I approach meaning-making as a collective act, creating work that fosters dialogue, accountability, and shared responsibility.

As a Philadelphia-based photographer and writer, my practice explores memory, placemaking, civic identity, and class through an intimate documentary lens, centering the overlooked, the everyday, and the powerful act of bearing witness. Anchored in visual storytelling, my work integrates design research, community archiving, and memory work, examining how rituals, spaces, and social patterns shape communal experiences and sustain cultural continuity. As a teaching artist, arts consultant, and artist matchmaker, I create pathways for connection—linking people, projects, and purpose to amplify community-driven creativity, cultural equity, and shared understanding.

My work exists at the intersection of memory, civic identity, and class consciousness—where photographs become both archive and altar. Through the lens, I document joy, resilience, displacement, and ritual in everyday Black life, paying close attention to how communities shape and are shaped by the spaces they inhabit. Integrated with design research, community archiving, and memory work, my practice examines who is remembered, who is erased, and how collective narratives shift when communities tell their own stories. Whether I’m capturing a neighborhood festival, a crumbling stoop, or a ritual that persists across a decade, I make visible what systems often obscure: that belonging, beauty, and cultural power are birthrights.

My process begins with walking—moving through neighborhoods, festivals, and everyday spaces with an eye for what is overlooked, endangered, or ritualized. I work with a digital camera and minimal editing tools, guided by observation, intuition, and deep presence. I don’t stage scenes—I wait for moments to unfold naturally. Beyond capturing images, I steward archives, document oral histories, and contextualize cultural practices, integrating these into design research and memory work. My goal is to chronicle a sense of presence that resides in moments of transition, tension, and joy. Behind the camera, I am a witness; in the archive and research, I am a steward. Together, the image, its context, and the knowledge it preserves become acts of cultural preservation, reflection, and inquiry.