Born and raised in Chicago, Adam J. Smith began acting and public speaking in high school, during which time he became a State Champion and National Semi-Finalist in Original Oratory. He then attended Duke University, where he graduated magna cum laude with degrees in theater and economics. He spent his post-Duke years in New York City as an actor, performing Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway in various venues throughout the city, and internationally at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. While in NYC, he also studied at the Michael Howard Studios.
He left New York to pursue his MFA at the renowned theater program at University of California—San Diego/La Jolla Playhouse, where he worked and studied with some of the top teachers and directors in American theater, including Kyle Donnelly, Darko Tresjnak, Les Waters, Fiona Shaw, Anne Bogart, Tina Landau, Robert Egan, Des McAnuff, Stephen Wadsworth, and more. While serving as Supervising TA, he helped reconfigure the undergraduate UCSD Public Speaking curriculum, and taught Intro to Acting, for which he was honored with distinction by the Theatre Department upon graduation.
After UCSD, he moved to Los Angeles, where he has worked for over 25 years as a multi-award-winning, classically-trained actor, having shared the stage and screen with Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe winners and nominees (he himself has a regional Emmy Award). In 2006, he won an Emmy Award for starring in When Things Get Small, a wacky and educational look at the world of nanoscience. His film and television appearances include Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon (Parts I & II), Bloody Bridget, The Good Doctor, Jane the Virgin, The Orville, Taken 3, Scandal, 90210, Castle, Medium, Victorious, Chemistry, Without a Trace, Numb3rs, As the World Turns, androles in award-winning films and commercials. As a voiceover artist, he narrated the Discovery Channel series, Bounty Wars, has voiced multiple video games such as Grand Theft Auto V and Final Fantasy XIII, dubbed various Netflix TV hits such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Who Killed Sara?, and has narrated commercials, educational science videos, promos, campaign ads, trailers, an audio tour for SFMOMA, and multiple audiobooks. He is a member of APA (Audiobooks Producers Association) and PANA (Professional Audiobook Narrators Association).
As an award-winning theater artist with a penchant for Shakespeare (having worked on 15 of the plays in the canon), he’s performed in countless productions at Southern California’s most well-known venues, including the Mark Taper Forum/CTG & Kirk Douglas Theater/CTG, Pasadena Playhouse, South Coast Rep, The Walt Disney Concert Hall (alongside the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra), La Jolla Playhouse, Ojai Playwrights Conference, International City Theater, Boston Court, Wilshire Ebell, and Antaeus Company (where he’s a Company Member and served on the Board of Directors), as well as its less conventional, but equally exciting venues such as The Huntington Gardens (with CalArts’ Center for New Performance), The Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Mountain View Mausoleum, and La Brea Tar Pits Museum (with Chalk Rep). Elsewhere, he’s performed at the Chautauqua Theater Company (NY), 24-Hour Play Festival (NYC), New Perspectives (NYC), as well as in numerous productions Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway.
As a teacher, prior to joining CalArts, he taught Acting and Public Speaking at UCSD, The Actor’s Instrument and Scene Study at The Acting Corps (in LA), Voice/Movement and Dialects at TVI (in LA). He has also taught Movement & Voice in South Coast Rep’s Summer Adult Acting Conservatory, as well as at Moving Arts. As a director, his production of Glint, a one-man adaptation of a David Foster Wallace short story, was named Best of the Hollywood Fringe Festival and was subsequently presented at The Actor’s Gang Theater in LA (as G.O.Ne). He has also directed for the Chalk Rep Flash Fests, Santa Monica Rep’s WAVE Fest, at the Central Public Library in LA and the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, and assistant-directed Rafael Lopez-Barrantes on Barroco at CalArts. He was chosen as a participating director in the 2012 Directors Lab West summer program. In addition, he served as on-set dialect coach for Fox TV’s Splitsville and has voice/text/dialect-coached LA theater productions of the acclaimed Circle of Will and Guided Consideration of a Lamentable Deed, as well as numerous CalArts productions. He is a professional private dialect coach, working with everyone from actors to CEOs (learning an American accent).
As a writer, his plays have been given readings and workshops at The Magic Theater (in San Francisco) and CUNY in NYC, a screenplay has currently been named a Quarter Finalist in multiple competitions, and his writing has been published online at the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2013, he served as an official judge for Drama in the prestigious PEN CENTER USA Literary Awards. His most recent TV pilot was a Finalist, Semi-Finalist, and Quarter-Finalist at various high-profile screenplay competitions. He is an Artistic Advisory Board Member of Best Fit Education LLC, and is a member of both VASTA and PAVA, having assisted Rafael Lopez-Barrantes in presenting a workshop of the Barrantes Voice System to an international community of voice professionals at the 2020 PAVA Annual Symposium. He is a Certified Teacher of the Barrantes Voice System.
