Vladimir Alexander Smith Mesa (Havana 1966) began his university studies in Russia and finished them at the University of Havana, graduating in Information and Library Science in 1995.

He was in charge of the Alfonso Reyes Library in the Historic Centre of the City and later, he also worked as a librarian at the Cuban American Library of the Oficina del Historiador de la Habana.

Since 1997, he lives in London. He worked for Canning House, the home of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Council, a non-political, non-profit making organization that was ounded in 1943 to stimulate understanding between Britain, Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

He works as a cataloguer for the UCL-School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library. He is finishing his Ph.D. on the cinematic exchanges between Cuba and Eastern Europe during Soviet years in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies (UCL).

He has presented several talks on Latin American literature and film in different academic and cultural institutions such as la Academia de Ciencias in Cuba, La Capilla Alfonsina (Mexico City), Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico), University of Connecticut (United States) and British universities.

He has been the curator of various retrospectives of Cuban Film in the United Kingdom. He has collaborated with the Latin American Film Festival in London, the British Film Institute, the BFI South bank and the Discovering Latin America Film Festival. His most recent collaboration was dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of EICTV (International School of Film in Television in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba). Vladimir Smith is the founder and curator of the Festival of the Moving Image at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre and the British-Cuban Heritage Foundation for the arts.