Ebonie Smith

In the late eighties, the face of Ebonie Smith was in millions of homes around the world.

In 1987, she landed the role of Carrie Murtaugh in the first installment of Lethal Weapon. It wasn't a token part, because her character served to humanize the sergeant played by Danny Glover. She did it with a naturalness that let her return for the three sequels that followed in the film franchise.

She was a girl working among giants.

She balanced action films with prime-time television. She joined The Cosby Show to play M'Liss and soon after moved on to the sitcom Family Matters. Back then, child contracts in Hollywood ran like an endless assembly line. But she decided her path would not end under the spotlight.

The Shift from Camera to Mixing Board

In the mid-nineties, her on-screen presence deliberately began to taper off. She appeared in episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Hangin' with Mr. Cooper before definitively closing her chapter as a child actress. Earnings from reruns helped fund a technical education that few expected from a star of her profile.

She enrolled at the University of Virginia and later at Berklee. There she discovered she preferred the control of the sound console to the tyranny of the camera frame. Sound offers a power that acting often denies Black women in the American industry.

The industry did not see this move coming.

In 2007, she founded Gender Amplified. The organization was created to give visibility to women in music production and sound engineering. Only 2% of music producers worldwide are women, and Smith decided to tackle that statistic from within the system.

From Film Sets to Recording Studios

Her move to Atlantic Records as a sound engineer marked a major professional shift. She worked on high-budget projects and recordings that went on to win Grammy Awards. In 2017, she joined the technical team on the album Hamilton, and her name began to make waves in New York's production circles.

Smith never sought to revive the fame of her childhood. She preferred the anonymity of mixing studios and the discipline of technology applied to art. Her transition is now considered a case study in how to leave the Los Angeles studio system with dignity.

There is no nostalgia in her interviews about the years of Lethal Weapon.

For her, film was a formative stage that was necessary, but audio is her true calling. In 2024, her recording studio processes audio tracks at a sampling rate of 192 kHz to ensure maximum sound fidelity.