Mona Z. Smith is a playwright, screenwriter, author, and former newspaper reporter. She is also a consultant to nonprofits and teaches theater and writing.

Smith started her professional writing career at The Miami Herald, covering crime and politics. She moved to Paris, France in the 1980s, where she worked in the tourism industry. She returned to the U.S. to earn her MFA in theater and playwriting at Columbia University, where she studied with Andrei Serban and the late Romulus Linney. She twice won Columbia's John Golden Award for playwriting. Smith's thesis play, Borderlands, is a meditation on women, war, and ethnic cleansing that premiered at SoHo Rep (NYC). Written and performed during the Bosnian conflict, Borderlands was awarded the national Berilla Kerr Prize in 1996. In 2016, on the 20th anniversary of its world premiere, Borderlands was revived in Amsterdam as part of an artist-led effort to raise funds for women refugees in Syria. 

Smith has written and co-written over a dozen other plays, screenplays, and adaptations during the past two decades, including: Fire in a Dark House; Becoming Something; The Canada Lee Project, All that Remains (winner of seven Po'okela Awards, including best script); Northern Lights (commissioned by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival); The Native Son Project; The Dick and Jane Plays (three related one-acts); as well as five play adaptations for young audiences (also commissioned by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival).

Smith also wrote the first social biography of Canada Lee, titled Becoming Something (Faber & Faber, 2004). This critically acclaimed work was based on over a decade of research on Lee, a pioneering black actor and civil rights activist who was virtually erased from public memory after he was denounced as a Communist and traitor during the McCarthy-Era Red Scare.  The book and her earlier play of the same name are in development for television and film. 

Based in the Hudson Valley, Smith divides her working hours between writing and consulting for nonprofit organizations in New York and California.