Ian Michael Smith

Ian Michael Smith (born May 5, 1987) is an American actor, known for his starring role in Simon Birch.[1][2]

Ian Michael Smith
Born (1987-05-05) May 5, 1987
Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S.
OccupationActor, Software Engineer
Height3 ft 1 in (0.94 m)

His short physical stature (3 ft 1 in (0.94 m)) is a result of Morquio syndrome,[3] a rare enzymatic disorder affecting the circulatory, muscular and skeletal systems.

Life and work

Smith was born in Elmhurst, Illinois. A Chicago-area hospital worker approached his parents about him auditioning for the leading role in The Mighty, a feature film about a character with Morquio Syndrome. Kieran Culkin was cast instead, but Smith was recommended for the title role of Simon Birch (1998), a film based loosely on John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, which also called for a small child actor.

He graduated from York Community High School in Elmhurst in 2005. He has undergone several operations including a spinal fusion and two bilateral osteotomies. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009, and Gallaudet University in 2012 and now works as a software engineer. He is a co-founder of a nonprofit organization, Project Alloy, that gives assistance to underrepresented people in tech fields.[4][5] In 2019, he joined a class action lawsuit against the City of Oakland for excluding people with disabilities from the city’s rent control program.[6][7]

gollark: <@426660245738356738> shell.resolve
gollark: Maybe? The shell API is handled oddly.
gollark: If you want it to work like shell.run would, and you do for compatibility, that may be harder. But probably not massively so actually.
gollark: *Those* would error properly, and most programs only use printError for nonfatal errors.
gollark: They don't do anything you couldn't do yourself with loadfile and lots of work to pretend to be like the shell API and do its weird environment hackery.

References
  1. Holden, Stephen (September 11, 1998). "FILM REVIEW; Tiny Boy With an Enormously Consuming Quest". The New York Times.
  2. "SIMON BIRCH". British Board of Film Classification. 1998-10-06. Retrieved 2012-12-20.
  3. Ian Michael Smith at Hollywood.com
  4. "Beyond Disability 101: Ian Smith's Hopes for Tech | Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability". longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  5. "Reasons to be cheerful". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  6. "Renters with disabilities sue Oakland for housing discrimination". The Mercury News. 2019-08-28. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  7. "Disabled Tenants Sue Oakland Over Rent Control Laws, High Cost Of Accessible Homes". 2019-08-28. Retrieved 2019-11-23.


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