Baird grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago where he graduated from New Trier High School with a strong interest in architecture.
 
He attended the Environmental Design School at the University of Colorado. His second semester senior year he spent on the World Campus Afloat visiting 10 countries in Africa and Asia. During the voyage, he served as photographer for a 40-student excursion into China becoming one of the first Americans to visit mainland China after Nixon opened relations with the Chinese.
 
After graduating with a Bachelor of Environmental Design, Baird pursued his love of storytelling and relocated to Los Angeles where he wrote, produced and directed over a hundred television magazine segments, travel specials and a nationally syndicated documentary for KABC-TV.
 
He moved his young family back to Chicago where Baird produced for a weekly, half-hour, magazine style program for the ABC affiliate, WLS-TV. Over seven years, he wrote and produced a half-hour show every month.
 
He left WLS to start his own company, autumn pictures, where he optioned stories for TV movies and sold the story treatments to network producers in Los Angeles.
 
Simultaneously, he wrote, produced and directed news stories, magazine segments and documentaries for ABC News, ABC Sports, ESPN, NBC News and NBC Sports.
 
He has written 5 feature film screenplays.
 
Along with writing and producing, Baird is a licensed real estate broker in Illinois and works with his two daughters at the Smart LeMire Real Estate Group and Compass. They help clients buy and sell residential real estate on the northside of Chicago and northern suburbs.
 
Only Ann Knows is his first novel.