The paper presents a theoretical formulation for spherical shells reinforced by meridional and circumferential stiffeners. Active damping of the shell is introduced through control action of piezoelectric coupled pairs bonded to the meridional stiffeners. The induced loads can include radial pressure and a thermal field that are independent of the circumferential coordinate. Neglecting local deformations between adjacent meridional stiffeners, the response of the shell will be axisymmetric. The analysis employs the Donnell-Mushtari-Vlasov version of Love's theory of shells together with a smeared stiffeners technique. The paper also considers a particular case of shell mounted piezoelectric coupled pairs without conventional stiffeners. A closed form solution is derived for spherical panels without conventional stiffeners within the range of the meridional coordinate between 75° and 90° using a version of the Geckeler approximation.