Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Smith-Cruz worked for five years as an associate dean at NYU Libraries and for nine years at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she served as Head of Reference.^[3] She has also worked as a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library and as an archive coordinator at StoryCorps. She serves on the board of Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). In March 2025, she became dean of the library at Barnard College.^[3]

Smith-Cruz was appointed as the commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in April 2026. Upon her appointment, writer and community archivist Alexis Pauline Gumbs expressed her support, saying, "For the past 20 years I have been inspired by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz's dedication and tenacity in preserving priceless histories and advocating for information access across a range of important institutions."^[1] Her appointment was celebrated in the magazine The Advocate, which noted "[h]er appointment places an out LGBTQ+ Black woman in charge of safeguarding the official record of the nation's largest city."^[2] Smith-Cruz taught at Pratt Institute's School of Information from 2018-2026, taking a break from teaching to focus on her work at DORIS.

Smith-Cruz was a coordinator of the Lesbian Herstory Archives for twenty years. In 2020 she was awarded the Award for Significant Achievement in Women & Gender Studies Librarianship by the American Library Association's Women & Gender Studies Section to honor her work with the Lesbian Herstory Archives to collect and preserve materials from the Black lesbian organization Salsa Soul Sisters.^[5]

• Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations on Identity and Libraries (two volumes) edited by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz and Sara A. Howard, 2024.^[6]
• Forty-Five Years: a Tribute to the Lesbian Herstory Archives edited by Elvis Bakaitis, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, and Red Washburn, 2020.