An Artist Bio Gets Real

Saide Smith is a thirty-two-year-old writer and photographer who just got approved for Medicaid. She lives in Brooklyn in a tiny apartment on a couch with no internet (she submitted this piece by walking to a nearby bar, ordering a water and tipping a dollar in exchange for the Wi-Fi password). For entertainment, she watches one of six mediocre rom-com DVDs that she bought for five dollars at Goodwill. She personally owns three pairs of pants, no furniture, and very few earthly possessions. She earned her MFA at a prestigious liberal arts school where she studied a bunch of Virginia Woolf alongside too many twenty-four-year-olds who were writing their first memoirs about their grandparents dying and their first jobs working at Dillard’s. Her photographic work has appeared in national magazines, but let’s not fool anyone—do they even pay anymore? Her writing has appeared in a bunch of large publications edited by skeezy tennis-lovers with Ross-from-Friends-haircuts who have ganked her ideas and incorporated them into their own pieces. She’s not interested in shooting your shitty airy campaign, or your new one-word-titled expensive quarterly with Sans Serif hybrid font and white border and the ’70s-looking model on the cover. Gallery owners need not inquire because she doesn’t photograph nubile, naked rich people setting off smoke bombs in the back of pickup trucks in the desert. And if you ask her if she’s seen the show Girls with a knowing, I-pegged-you look on your face, she’ll probably slap you in the mouth.

Feel free to follow her on Twitter or Instagram or like her Facebook page so she can achieve some false sense of entitlement and success.