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Cairo Smith was born July 12, 1997 in Berkeley, California. His father is voice actor Christopher Corey Smith. He is a Cancer sun, Libra moon, and Sagittarius rising. His mother’s mother was born in West Jerusalem to an Egyptian father and Turkish mother. His mother’s father was Sinhalese, born in Sri Lanka. His mother is the sister of chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals Rowan D. Wilson. His father is of mixed English, Welsh, and scattered Western European descent, with colonial American roots.

At age two, Smith’s nanny considered abducting him to Russia to raise as her son, which would have been a very different life path. At age four his parents moved him to Culver City, California. He enrolled in Montessori school from preschool to third grade, then transferred into public school in Rancho Palos Verdes.

In elementary school, he began making stop-motion science fiction films using LEGO and a DV tape camcorder. He also began his first creative writing juvenilia in the form of both prose fiction and screenplays. He received an offline secondhand Windows PC from his uncle at age six, and in fourth grade he bought himself an iBook G4 with his birthday savings. His formative elementary media included A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Pharaoh and Caesar III city-builders, Age of Empires II, Zoo Tycoon, Mall Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and 4, Star Trek: The Original Series, and eventually Halo Demo for Mac. He spent a long time in October of 2007 assembling and painting a UNSC Marine costume from sports gear and Star Wars blaster parts, with his mother’s help.

Smith’s primary childhood interests were history, creative writing, reading, illustration, playing video games, going deep into the internet, and not doing his homework. He also built models and had a collection of kitbashed water guns. From sixth to ninth grade he was determined to become a professional concept artist like Lorraine McClees, but soon decided his efforts were better applied to writing and film. His family kept cats, dogs, and chickens on their Palos Verdes property. He has a half-sister by his mother’s subsequent marriage, following his parents’ divorce. In eighth grade, he created his first internet publication, a satirical roundup of Halopedia editor drama called The Lockout Weekly, which was mostly just a project to troll one particular administrator. He also wrote his first scene report for TLW in 2008, after visiting a pop-up event in San Diego and waiting in line for four hours to play Halo 3: ODST early.

At the start of high school, Smith’s mother and sister moved out of state, and Smith moved in with his father in a one-bedroom apartment. They eventually upgraded to two. At that time, Smith began to shoot live-action short film at and around his high school, recruiting his friends as cast and crew. The first of these was “Undead Language” (2014), a horror comedy about a curse possessing his Latin class and teacher. “Undead Language” also saw the first collaboration between Cairo Smith and Claire Guimary, fellow students, who started dating shortly after production. All through high school, Smith and his mother kept in touch in part with elaborate collaborative worldbuilding projects, which he credits as the core of his practical storytelling education.

In August of 2014, he began working with his mother on the fantasy setting of Selonia, which would become the basis for his first completed novel manuscript, a steampunk young adult adventure called The Unbeckoned Rising. Around this time, he sold his first piece of fiction to an editor, placing “Presence” with Claire L. Evans at VICE. In 2015, he graduated high school and moved to Eugene, Oregon against almost everyone’s wishes to live with Claire Guimary while she studied at the University of Oregon. From 2015 to 2017, Smith attended Lane Community College, studying French, film, and theater. He also got very into RimWorld and XCOM. At LCC, Cairo became the news director of the college paper The Torch. He covered school politics, which later turned into a school senate run on a platform of fiscal austerity. He won his race and served one term, successfully passing a tightened budget with more robust future oversight provisions.

In summer of 2016, Smith shot his second short film, “Planet California,” an absurd camp satire about alien hostage videos, robot musicians, and fast food. Dozens of his high school friends again pitched in and volunteered as crew. The film was completed and released in December of 2017.

In fall of 2016, Smith started developing a semi-cooperative crew-management space opera board game called Starfarers. That October, conspicuously leaving out the fact that he was not an enrolled student, Smith pitched with Claire Guimary and was accepted to co-write, co-produce, and direct a fall term miniseries for UO’s DuckTV. The four-episode show, Archival, explored the activities of a 1970s college serial killer (played by Guimary) through the frame of found Super 8 footage. Archival was photographed by director Weihao Wang, then a UO student. It starred Claire Guimary, Dylan Carlini, Billy King, and Matthew Fairman. It received multiple “Force Awards,” named for UO Professor Rebecca Force, in its run.

In December of 2016, Smith began writing “The Peninsula,” a short film tracing the history of his hometown of Palos Verdes from pre-Columbian times to present day in a series of vignettes.

At the start of 2017, Smith was asked by Professor Brian Haimbach, head of the theater department at LCC, to direct a performance of Oleanna in Eugene’s black box Blue Door Theater. This production starred Milo Kent-Pettit and Cortney Grant. He also wrote lyrics for an Oregon rock opera rendition of the Oresteia which won him and his fellow writers a Kennedy Center award. Following the success of Oleanna, Cairo pitched the Blue Door board and was hired to produce and direct his original one-act play, Neikeans. The play follows two theater actors, a lightning technician, and a director who become trapped in their college theater during an active shooting on the campus. It was written for the whole theater space, using the catwalks, lighting booth, and portions of the seats as what they actually are. The original ending, which involved the shooter entering the space with an AR-15, was vetoed by the department, and an alternate ending was written.

Neikeans ran for two shows on the weekend of June 10, 2017, to strong reception. It starred Darius Bunce, Tilese Haight, Emma Rain, and Samantha Fox. Emily Bolivar was the stage manager, with lighting design by Gordon McFarland. That same spring, Smith also secured a grant from the LCC student government, which he no longer served as senator, to write and direct a short film called “Cascadia,” staged as interviews with survivors of a future Pacific Northwest earthquake.

In summer of 2017, after securing a grant from the Palos Verdes Association of Realtors, Smith directed “The Peninsula” as his fourth short film over five days on-location in Palos Verdes.

That fall, Smith transferred from Lane Community College to Santa Monica College to complete his Associate’s degree and apply to universities with a California community college transcript. He also began working as a director and event videographer for the map-based spy game Ingress from Niantic Labs, which often involved him flying to far-flung cities to stage espionage scenes and sometimes get kidnapped by zealous fans. During this period, he began development of his first feature film, Screwdriver, a psychological thriller. He also continued to develop Starfarers with mixed success, and worked at the furniture store Jonathan Adler in downtown Santa Monica selling couches and tchotchkes. While at Jonathan Adler, he wrote his novel Komodo on the POS machine over the course of dozens of slow nights.

In 2018, Smith transferred to California State University, Northridge as a Screenwriting junior. He also began volunteering as a production assistant and later a consulting producer on USC undergraduate student films, and continued to shoot for Niantic. He was invited to apply to join the Niantic team full-time, but declined because the commitment would have forced him to drop out of college. In July of that year, he moved to Encino, California with recent UO graduate Claire Guimary. In August, they co-produced the psychological thriller short “Lapse” in two days without sleep for a forty-eight-hour film competition. Smith wrote and directed, and Guimary starred as Kim, a political operative.

At CSUN, Smith started work on campus as the sole student media archivist in the large, underused production studio beneath Oviatt Library. He quickly turned it into his personal office, covering the walls with posters and playing music on the studio PA, and nobody seemed to mind. He also began to produce and direct industrial commercials for various Chinese logistics corporations over the weekends. Working at Oviatt, Smith wrote his middle-grade Sri Lankan fantasy adventure novel The Heart of Sri Katava, which he later adapted into a feature film screenplay.

In summer of 2019, after an extended rehearsal period, Smith directed his feature script Screwdriver in Sherman Oaks. Charlie Farrell, Milly Sanders, and AnnaClare Hicks played the lead roles. The film was produced by No Sudden Movies and Smith’s brand-new production company, Askari. That winter, as a senior at CSUN, Smith interned at Untitled Entertainment in Beverly Hills as a de facto unpaid assistant on a literary desk. After trying for six months to edit Screwdriver himself, Smith eventually hired then-student filmmaker Weiyang Li as editor in February of 2020. He also began doing live camera operator work for broadcast events outside of school and internship hours.

Smith graduated CSUN with honors in spring of 2020. Due to COVID-19, he did not have a ceremony, and his last semester was remote. The pandemic also meant the unplanned end of his Hollywood internship. As his thesis, Smith wrote his feature film script Lord of Space, a screwball comedy about George Lucas attempting to get the first Star Wars film off the ground. After graduating, Smith started work as an assistant to PR executive Linda Swick at International Promotions in North Hollywood, and also got his best friend a job there. While at IP, Smith began taking film industry general meetings as a screenwriter, being unofficially represented by Alex Varon, an Untitled Entertainment literary assistant. The duo used the feature scripts Lord of Space and Sri Katava as samples.

That fall, Smith began developing a feature film script called Prowlers, about a clique of Cincinnati highway police who are secretly predatory vampires, after interest from Seth Rogen’s company Point Grey. He also bet an unwise sum of money on the 2020 presidential election, and hit, leading him to take leave from IP to focus on Prowlers and a rewrite of Lord of Space. At this time, Smith began working regularly as an adaptation writer for foreign films and television dubbed into English, with clients from Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, Hulu, and Disney+.

In early 2021, Sri Katava became a Screencraft competition finalist. Smith also began reading for screenplay competitions such as Scriptapalooza professionally at this time. Shortly after, Lord of Space won the second place PAGE Award in the historical category, and was distributed by the competition staff to Hollywood readers. As a result, Smith was courted and signed by literary and talent company Make GOOD Content, who wanted to kickstart his television writing career. In response to their request for a TV pilot sample, Smith developed Republic, a reimagining of the events of the Second Punic War with a Jazz Age level of technology. Make GOOD found it somewhat baffling but nonetheless agreed to use it as a sample. In April of that year, compelled by the Muse, he wrote and coded a text adventure with over 90,000 words of dialogue called Claudia Braun and the Disappearing Sable.

In July of 2021, on a trip to Hawaii, Smith met Cowri Labs founder Kenny White and helped him sketch out a marketing strategy for the Cowri Ethereum dapp Shell Protocol. Shortly after, Smith accepted an offer to become CMO of Cowri and deprioritized his adaptation-for-hire work. He began commuting monthly from Los Angeles to Honolulu to develop the Shell marketing plan. He also brought on Chandler Berke, Askari’s first-ever longstanding outside hire, to help with the company’s increased workload. Inspired by the Pearl Harbor museum, he began developing a WWII naval battle board game called Sea War!

In November of 2021, after a discussion with Make GOOD, Smith began work on an indie-scale action thriller to serve as his next feature film. This became the feature script Stygiana.

In March of 2022, Screwdriver premiered in Los Angeles. It debuted in LA at Dances With Films and in New York in October at SoHo. In May, Smith was hired to write a series of comic books called APE for an NFT project. The scripts were well received, and he was paid, but the comics were ultimately killed in production when the value of the NFT collapsed. Later that spring, the same thing happened again with an eighty-page story bible for the NFT property Martian Premier League.

Based on Screwdriver’s festival reception, Askari was approached with offers from several distributors, and ultimately signed with Buffalo 8 in October. Three weeks later, on an early Thanksgiving trip to the Bay Area, Smith got caught in a stretch of highway flash flood and crashed his Crown Victoria just outside Walnut Creek. His airbag did not deploy, and he broke his neck, becoming quadriplegic. Claire Guimary was beside him in the vehicle and survived the crash with a concussion. In the overturned car, Smith proposed to Guimary, and she accepted, although she has no memory of the events.

Smith was rushed into surgery at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek on November 9, 2022. His spinal cord was determined to be crushed but not severed, leaving open the possibility of significant recovery over the following year. At John Muir, Smith was scouted by representatives from Craig Hospital, one of the leading spinal cord inpatient rehabilitation facilities, for their high-intensity program. He was accepted, and subsequently flew to Denver on a medical jet’s gurney in late November. Smith participated in the extreme rehab regimen at Craig from November of 2022 to February of 2023, at which point it was determined that he was most likely a motor complete injury, with any future gain of muscle function unlikely. He was discharged that month with a power wheelchair and an hours-a-day care routine. At Craig, facing the situation, Claire Guimary agreed to become not only Smith’s wife but his caregiver in presumptive perpetuity.

Throughout rehab and upon his return home, Smith continued working for Cowri as CMO, developing new gamified mechanisms and building out the world of the brand. In January of 2023 he began developing “Red Team,” a techno-thriller short about a malicious AI. In August of 2023, Smith began collaborating with Nathan Eitingon on a sixties-set paranoid satire feature script, Believe in the Mothman. They finished the feature script in August, and presented it to Make GOOD, again to their bafflement. In September of that year, lacking the health to pursue a writers’ room job in television, Smith parted ways with Make GOOD and turned solely to literature and film as his creative pursuits. Three months later, Smith released No Return, a paperback collection of highlights from his first twelve years writing short stories.

In January and February of 2024, Smith directed “Red Team” in Los Angeles, his fifth short film. It stars Matt Fairman, Taylor McKnight, and The Chosen’s Luke Dimyan. At this time, he also founded Futurist Letters, a Substack-and-print literary fiction journal that he originally intended to be his personal blog. Smith left Cowri shortly after in order to focus on his health and outpatient rehabilitation. In June, he released Komodo, his 2017 novel, through Askari. In November of 2024, Smith released Quarterlives, his second short story collection, consisting of stories originally written for Futurist. Matt Pegas, author of Dragon Day (who has since co-founded New Ritual Press), wrote the foreword.

In March of 2025, Smith released Calinitia Dreaming, a midcentury fantasy detective novel. In September, he released Scenebux, a modern-day tech-noir satirical picaresque, through New Ritual Press. Around that time, he began adapting for foreign TV and film again, although his physical capabilities severely limited his work. He also began working as a reader for the PAGE Awards. In June, Smith and Guimary moved to Lomita, California, close to their hometown. In October, “Red Team” premiered at SoHo and subsequently released online. In December, Smith released Current Affairs, a sweeping contemporary literary novel of distant romance in New York City.

In January of 2026, Smith released Burn Zone, a military tribunal novella set in a defeated America.

For all inquiries please contact cairo@askariproductions.com