Christen Smith is a multi-modal artist in New York City working as an animator, filmmaker, educator and consultant. Her maternal grandmother is from the people of Guangdong, China, and her paternal grandmother is from the European people who settled in Canada and southern Connecticut.

Christen began her commercial career as an animation worker, with TV credits including the Emmy-winning preschool series "The Wonder Pets!," Nick Jr.'s "Team Umizoomi," and Cartoon Network's "MAD," before moving on to edit countless commercials, short films, and short-form editorial content for clients as A&E, Audible, Hornet, and Digg. After being tasked to build and lead multidisciplinary teams producing content for the tech-media startup Digg and the Manhattan-based Church of the City New York, Christen launched the consulting arm of her practice as Trellis Creative Strategies. 

As an artist, Christen works in cinematic and experiential forms of animation, centering hand-drawn aesthetics and techniques as a point of departure for interrogating Western notions of womanhood and religion. She has also designed and contributed to art installations for prayer and meditation rooms in the city. Christen has been an adjunct professor of animation at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts since 2015, and has also taught at CUNY including Queens College, the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, and Hostos Community College in the South Bronx. Christen received her BFA in Film and Television from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and her forthcoming animated installation, "Blessed Are Those Who Are Angry," is a 2024 grant recipient of the Queens Arts Fund.