Audre Smikle is a San Francisco native working in Chicago as a Communications Assistant for the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.  Audre is deeply passionate about caring for her community through education, activism, and service.  She completed her Master of Science in Communication from Northwestern University in 2023 with a capstone project that focused on using social media for activism. There she learned how to implement strategic communication strategies, translating data into graphic communications, and how to implement organizational change.

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Audre is an artist who lives inside the thread. She finds motifs and follows them, believing that history tells a story that is both personal and global, and that the only way to make real change is to connect the intimate and the systemic, the grandmother and the policy, the farm and the legislature.

She began making documentary films in high school. Her solo-produced Education for All? (2014) received a C-SPAN honorable mention. At Northwestern University, where she double majored in Radio/Television/Film and African American Studies, she continued making documentary work on institutional whiteness and inequality. Her short narrative film Everything's Fine (2019) won awards at the Miami Indie Film Awards, Independent Shorts Awards International Film Festival, and IndieX Film Fest. She holds a Master of Science in Communication from Northwestern (2023). She has fourteen years of editing experience across documentary and narrative forms.

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She is tired of watching fascism, oceans, and apathy rise, and she is done staying quiet. She is now working on a feature length documentary titled The Invisible Cost of Poweing the Internet which follows the communities of the Great Lakes Basin. The film follows farmers, Indigenous nations, and environmental justice advocates, as they reckon with the arrival of new data centers built on polluting infrastructures that are reshaping their land, their water, and their electricity bills without their knowledge or consent. She carries a deep obligation to the Indigenous people who have stewarded this land long before she arrived. When she tells this story she wants them at the center of it, not as a backdrop, but as the living, fighting, brilliant heart of what this film is about. Making a feature documentary is new territory for her. But every time she looked at this story, it kept getting bigger than any short could hold. To her, success is the POWER Act passing and Indigenous communities using this film to map their own fight. She hopes to leave a playbook to fight powerful corporations and help people win. ​