Alena Smith is the creator, showrunner and executive producer of the critically- acclaimed series Dickinson, which ran for three seasons on Apple TV+. Dickinson won a Peabody Award, a Rotten Tomatoes Golden Tomato Fan Favorite Award, and was named on over 70 “Best of TV” lists for 2021, including the New York Times. The show was twice nominated for a GLAAD Media Award, and has been  recognized for its groundbreaking queer representation. A large collection of costumes, set pieces, and props from the show are now on view at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA; and an archive of scripts and other creative materials can be found at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Smith directed the series finale, “This Was a Poet--”. Previously, she served as writer and producer on The Affair and The Newsroom. She is currently developing a number of new projects for TV and film.

In addition to Smith’s writing for the screen, her nonfiction essays have been featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, and her plays have been produced in cities around the world. Variety said of her play Icebergs, which premiered in 2016 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, “Smith shows impeccable comic timing, and also knows how to layer her drama with pathos.” Other published plays include The Bad Guys, Plucker, The Lacy Project, and The New Sincerity, which the New York Times called “Splendid... entertaining and thought-provoking... comedy with a poignant edge.” Alena is also the author of Tween Hobo: Off The Rails, a novel based on her mid-2010s cult Twitter account, @tweenhobo.