Dan (aka See Dan Paint) was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He received both a BFA in Painting and a MAEd in Art Education from the University of Georgia. Spontaneous Monsterfication is a technique Smith developed that utilizes spontaneously painted cartoonish and monsterish faces to enhance spaces through a jigsaw arrangement of shapes and faces. His art continues to be influenced by the Saturday morning cartoons of his childhood, punk rock culture, and the art of skateboards. After teaching Art in elementary and high schools for twenty years, he is now the Fine Arts and Physical Education Curriculum Coordinator at the Clarke County School District. In his spare time, he completed a PhD student in Art Education at the University of Georgia. His research has evolved from framing an understanding of dual careers as an artist-teacher through art-based research to considering the artist-teacher (or artisteacher) in a post-qualitative paradigm drawing on affect theory and the DIY punk aesthetics of the everyday.

My art and research are tied to my personal, hierological, mythological, pseudo-historical accounts of my becoming an artist-teacher-skateboarder-punk rocker-father-reseracher, etc. I approach varied spaces (quadrants, strips, stripes, etc.) by enacting the process of spontaneous monsterfication, where the aforementioned spaces are enhanced through the application of monsterfied space. My research has shifted from a personal autoethnographic exploration of the artist-teacher to an investiagtion for how the ordinary might impact the universal “I”.