Kevin V. Smith is a director, performer and writer whose work forges a theatre of rupture and revelation—filled with hauntings, cascading realities, blurred identities, and ecstatic attempts to reach beyond one’s skin. Smith’s training began not in a conservatory but in the rehearsal room. At nineteen, he joined the avant-garde ensemble EgoPo in pre-Katrina New Orleans, immersing himself in corporeal performance traditions and studying Viewpoints and Grotowski, alongside longtime collaborator Daiva Bhandari. In the two decades since, his career has become synonymous with daring emotional force and visionary formal experimentation.

As an actor, Smith is known for bringing to the stage a bodily and emotional tension of almost unbearable intensity – sustaining an electrifying presence across silences and long monologues delivered like exorcisms. At twenty-one, he performed in Mary Zimmerman’s Pericles (Goodman Theatre, 2006) and broke through the same year Off-Broadway with EgoPo/Cocteau’s The Maids X 2, a double-cast Genet for which The New York Times called him “fearless.” His performance in Our Bad Magnet (Mary-Arrchie, 2008) earned his first Joseph Jefferson Award nomination. He was named Best Actor of the Year by Chicago Stage Review for Vincent River (Theatre Y, 2011). 

He earned additional Jeff nominations for Taste (Red Theater Chicago, 2016) and for his work in Maxim Dosko’s monologue Radio Culture (TUTA Theatre, 2018), hailed by Chicago on the Aisle as “a tour de force performance of the most impeccable subtlety.” Other notable acting credits include Cherrywood (Mary-Arrchie, 2010), directed by Tony Award-winner David Cromer; Koltès’ solo piece Night Just Before the Forest (Lake Como in Rome, 2012); and the English-language premiere of Peter Handke’s The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (Theatre Y, 2015), directed by Zeljko Djukic. 

Smith’s work as a director, defined by juxtaposition and disruption, has been described as “in search of a new paradigm for what is considered acceptable theatre in America” (Chicago Critic). He stages texts against themselves, creating parallel worlds, inhabited by women and genderqueer performers, that reframe canonical narratives and amplify what the text cannot contain. His stagings for Theatre Y include Joyce’s Exiles (2011); Camus’ The Misunderstanding (2011); Euripides’ Medea (2014); and an adaptation of Andras Visky’s Juliet (2020), which featured a chorus of mothers and infants on stage.

In 2019, Smith co-founded Blue in the Right Way with Daiva Bhandari. Their practice of collective dramaturgy brings visual and sound artists into shared creative process, working closely with scenic designer Tianxuan Chen, costume designer Alaina Moore, and video artist Eme Ospina-López, among others. His stagings there include: a queer bilingual deconstruction of Middleton’s 1621 tragedy Women Beware Women (2024) reframed by two transfeminine narrators; and a radical reimagining of Shulman & Smith’s 1954 Broadway comedy The Tender Trap (2025) as a Lynchian fever dream of gender performance and eroticized masculinity. 

In 2025, Blue in the Right Way established its base in France, where Smith continues to develop his work, expanding his exploration of multilingual performance, feminine space, and embodied form.