Virginia Twinam Smith (1923-2015) was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to John Courtenay Twinam Jr. (1899-1946) and Virginia Russell Twinam. The family lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Virginia married Robert "Bob" Milburn Smith (1921-1989) in 1943. The couple had two children, Courtenay Howell Smith (1945- ) and Deborah Smith Timberlake (1951- ), and relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1954. Virginia Twinam Smith served and volunteered with many cultural arts organizations such as the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the Atlanta Arts Festival, and the Atlanta Historical Society's (later Atlanta History Center) Tullie Smith House and Garden (later Smith Family Farm). She worked with the Sandy Springs Historic Community Foundation, where she helped create a photographic record of the Williams-Payne House Museum as well as tours and scripts for docents. Smith helped form the Chattahoochee Unit of the Herb Society of America and lectured on plants to garden clubs and other civic groups. In the early 1980s, Smith began taking photographs to supplement her slide lectures. As her interest in photography grew, she attended and graduated from the Professional Photography program of the Southeastern Center for the Arts in 1988. She was an active member of the Atlanta Photography Group and the Women in Focus organization. She established the Atlanta Photography Group's Georgia Print Purchase Award to purchase photographic prints for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and to support local photographers. In addition to photographing a comprehensive range of plants in the Southeastern States, she captured numerous outdoor sites, events and public venues, including street scenes and historic buildings.