Jeffrey K. Smith, Ph.D., is Professor and formerly Dean of the College of Education at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Prior to Otago, he was Professor and Chair of the Educational Psychology Department at Rutgers University.  From 1988 through 2005, he served as Head of the Office of Research and Evaluation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He studies issues in the psychology of aesthetics, learning in cultural institutions, and educational psychology.  

He is the author of Scoundrels, Cads, and Other Great Artists (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).  Other books include, The Museum Effect: How Museums, Libraries and Other Cultural Institutions Educate and Civilize Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and The Cambridge Handbook on the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts (co-editor with Pablo P. F. Tinio, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

He is a founding editor of the journal, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA). He received the Rudolph Arnheim Career Award from the APA (2011).  He also received the Gustav Fechner Award for distinguished contributions in empirical aesthetics from the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics (2016). His bachelors is from Princeton University and PhD from the University of Chicago.