Board Member – Gordon Dee Smith is a CEO, producer, writer, and specialist in intelligence, foreign policy, and global change. He works professionally in the areas of transactional intelligence, geopolitical and change risk analysis, and media and cultural production. He has worked in over 100 countries and served as an advisor for more than US $120 billion in investment transactions. He is founder, principal, and CEO of the private intelligence agency Strategic Insight Group (SIG), where he manages its global intelligence services for a client base of investors, law firms, and industrial concerns.

He is also currently Chair of the LLILAS/Benson Latin American Studies and Collections Advisory Council at the University of Texas at Austin.

Smith is creator, executive producer, and host of the television documentary series “A World On the Brink with Dee Smith”, which premiered in October 2017 on Real Vision Television and, starting in 2018, has been broadcast on the Public Broadcast System in over 40 media markets around the U.S. He currently hosts an ongoing television interview series on topics related to global change and geopolitical risk. He has also worked as an international venture capitalist active in Latin America and Europe, and before that, was a founder and president of InterCultura, an international NGO.

With expertise and connections in intelligence, international business, investment, and international relations, he is associated with international think tanks and research institutions in the foreign policy arena. Areas of work have ranged from investment and transactional intelligence to geopolitical analysis and risk forecasting, corporate market and competitor intelligence, corporate fraud investigations, litigation intelligence, and military intelligence and counter-terrorism. He has led projects in many industries, including finance, defense, high tech, energy, retail, transportation, and healthcare, among others, and has conducted operations in virtually all major jurisdictions across the globe.

Currently, Smith is: a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York; Chair of the Advisory Council of the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies and Benson Library, University of Texas at Austin (LLILAS/Benson Latin American Studies and Collections); a member of Chatham House in London; a member of the Bretton Woods Committee in Washington, D.C.; past president and a member of the board of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations (DCFR); a member of the Advisory Board of the Houston Committee on Foreign Relations (HCFR); and a member of the High Level Working Group on Inter-American Relations of Global Americans, based in New York City.

Also active in arts and cultural organizations, he has served as a volunteer leader of many charitable institutions and is currently: a member of the Advisory Board of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming; a member of the Board of Directors of the Van Cliburn Foundation in Fort Worth, Texas; a member of the Ambassador Council of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth; and a member of the Anthropology Committee of the Houston Museum of Natural Science. In the past, he has served as a board member of the American Federation of Arts in New York City, the Dallas Chamber Music Society, and a number of other organizations.

Smith has spoken in venues around the world at conferences, policy forums, universities, and cultural institutions in such cities as New York, London, San Francisco, Moscow, Tokyo, Oxford, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Marrakesh, Washington, D.C., Houston, Austin, Nashville, Aspen and many others, on topics including intelligence, investment due diligence, foreign policy, cultures in transformation, global change, and on his father’s collection of Native American art. Smith has written for The American Interest (Washington DC), The Octavian Report (New York), The Spectator (London, UK), The Business (London, UK), and other publications. His academic background comprises a number of research disciplines including archaeology, linguistic decipherment, geology, economics, and musicology. He has a degree in music theory and musicology from TCU, and studied Maya archaeology and epigraphy with noted Maya scholar Linda Schele at the University of Texas at Austin.