Ashleigh Smith is a Strategic Planner at FCB Chicago. Ashleigh’s personal mission is to utilize her passion and creativity to create opportunities to uplift and inspire diverse communities. A graduate of Duke University, Ashleigh has pursued this mission across a wide variety of creative environments, including art museums, art publications, creative PR teams, and most recently as a strategist at FCB Chicago. Ashleigh has worked with brands such as Gatorade, Krispy Kreme, and Pfizer, and has supported artists such as Diedrick Brackens, Doron Langberg, and Simone Leigh among others.

Before transitioning into the world of marketing, Ashleigh spent much of her collegiate career in museums and curatorial work. In her first-year post-grad, during the pandemic, Ashleigh started a collective for young curators of color. The Curator’s Pick was an online platform designed to uplift diverse curators invested in diverse art histories. The platform was active for over a year, garnering thousands of followers, dozens of regular members, and gaining the attention of creative leaders such as creative director Kwasi Fordjour and independent curator and writer Katy Hessel.

It’s through the building and implementation of this platform that Ashleigh found synergy between her art history background and the world of advertising. Deeply grounded in culture and creativity, Ashleigh sees strategy work as a natural evolution of her curatorial practice and finds joy in utilizing marketing and communications as a medium to inspire and uplift diverse communities.