Meet the DORIS Commissioner

As of May 18, 2026, the Office of the Mayor of New York City has appointed Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS).

Shawn comes to DORIS with nearly twenty-years of experience as a librarian and archivist, most recently serving as Dean of Barnard College Library where she oversaw the Barnard Library and the Barnard Archives & Special Collections, in addition to serving on academic senior leadership. Prior to Barnard, she served as Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement at NYU Division of Libraries, and as Head of Reference at the CUNY Graduate Center. For eight years, Shawn taught graduate library students at the Pratt School of Information, assigning reference letters from patrons who are incarcerated in collaboration with the New York Public Library’s Jail and Prison Services. Her work in archives stems from serving as a public speaker on archives, as a volunteer co-coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and as Archives Coordinator for Storycorps, among others. 

Shawn sits on the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), which works to create a sustainable culture of creativity, collaboration, and open exchange for libraries, archives, museums, and cultural institutions in the Metropolitan New York region and around the world. She has co-steered national conversations on critical librarianship and served as a special interest group leader with the Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE), where she led conversations on critical race theory in libraries, GenAI, and the roles of libraries and community-based narratives.

A Brooklyn native, Smith-Cruz co-founded the nonprofit Sister Outsider at age 17, supporting young women in East Flatbush and Brownsville through paid living wages to provide peer-education with a harm-reduction framework. Her Garifuna and Jamaican immigrant family history has centered her work philosophy on information access and transparency as necessary for equitable civic participation. Her NYC upbringing led her to be a community writer and culture producer, including serving as a collective member of the WOW Cafe Theater and as volunteer coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives—two volunteer-run NYC collectives with over fifty-year histories and intergenerational values. She was a recipient of a WGSS Award for Significant Achievement in Women's and Gender Studies, sponsored by Duke University Press, administered by the Association for College and Research Libraries for her work archiving and exhibiting the Salsa Soul Sisters, NYC’s first lesbian of color organization. She was also the managing editor for Sinister Wisdom Journal, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and series co-editor for the Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies of Litwin Books/ Library Juice Press. At Litwin, she co-edited a two-volume set: Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Archives and Practice and Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Identities and Libraries. For the past three years, she has been a judge for the Publishers Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut LGBTQ Fiction.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Queer Women's Studies from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. Her Master's in Library Science with a concentration in Archives, and Master's in Fine Arts with a focus on Fiction are each from Queens College, CUNY.