[2] Smith began writing and adapting plays, winning the Artistic Pick at the 2001 Seattle Fringe Festival with the solo show of Joe Wenderoth's book Letters to Wendy’s, directed by Austin Elston.
[3] Hired to come to New York to perform in Richard Foreman's King Cowboy Rufus Rules The Universe,[4] Smith was accepted into the Juilliard School's Playwriting Program under Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang.
[11] The following year, Smith and Fields received glowing reviews for Fugue, a violent choral play about the doomed love lives of classical composers Tchaikovsky, Gesualdo, and Schoenberg.
[12] Smith and Fields’ artistic relationship crumbled over contractual misunderstandings with their third and final production, the solo female prose play Ghost Light, whose single performance nonetheless generated good notices: "[Smith’s] words open up onto haunting and darkly grotesque psychic landscapes unreachable by more pedestrian dramatic entertainments, [ranging] in feeling from the experimental flash fictions of Donald Barthelme to the early schizophrenic-styled writing of Peter Handke.
[18] While Smith halted actively collaborating with Watts after the singer failed to credit Smith for co-writing the lyrics of viral hits “Fuck Shit Stack” and “What About Blowjobs?”,[19] their pieces played to acclaim and sold-out houses at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), ICA (Boston), Ars Nova (New York), among other venues.