Tony-Nominated Writer & Actress
Anna Deavere Smith: Biography at a Glance
- Anna Deavere Smith is a writer, actress, and educator who uses a new form of theatre to explore issues of community, character, and diversity in America.
- She discusses the many “complex identities of America” and interweaves her discussions with portrayals of people she has interviewed to illustrate the diversity of emotions and points of view on controversial issues.
- Her play, Notes from the Field, looks at the School-to-Prison Pipeline and injustice and inequality in low-income communities.
- On television, she is most recognizable as the hospital administrator on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie and the National Security Advisor on NBC’s The West Wing.
- Smith has also appeared in such films as The American President, Rachel Getting Married, and Philadelphia.
- Her books include Letters to a Young Artist and Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines.
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Biography
Anna Deavere Smith is a writer and actress. She’s credited with having created a new form of theater. Her plays, sometimes called “docudramas,” focus on contemporary issues from multiple points of view and are composed of excerpts from hundreds of interviews. Plays, and films based on them, include Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, both of which dealt with volatile race events in the 1990s; Let Me Down Easy, about the US healthcare system; and Notes from the Field, which focused on the school-to-prison pipeline.
Her work as an actress on television includes Inventing Anna, The West Wing, Nurse Jackie, and Black-ish. Mainstream movies include Philadelphia, The American President, Rachel Getting Married, and Here Today.
President Obama awarded Smith the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal. She was the 2015 Jefferson Lecturer. She’s the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, several Obie awards, two Drama Desk awards, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, and the Dean’s Medal from the Stanford University School of Medicine. She was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and nominated for two Tony Awards. She’s a University Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has several honorary doctorate degrees including those from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Spelman College, Prairie View University, Juilliard, and Oxford.
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A Special Note About Programs With Anna Deavere Smith
All presentations by Anna Deavere Smith include theatrical performance elements, as she steps away from the podium, transforming herself into characters she has created and selected for each event. These living portraits of both legendary and everyday people illustrate and illuminate the themes of her topics.
Snapshots: Portraits of a World in Transition
Ms. Smith, who is said to have created a new form of theater, has been listening to people across the country from all walks of life for decades, using Walt Whitman’s idea “to absorb America” as an inspiration. To illustrate her goal of bringing “people across the chasms” of what she calls the “complex identities of America,” Ms. Smith performs portrayals of people she has interviewed during the course of her presentation, recreating a diversity of emotions and points of view on controversial issues.
Reclaiming Grace in the Face of Adversity
We live in a winner-take-all society. And yet, part of our potential as humans is our potential for compassion and our resilience in the face of adversity. While doing research for her play Let Me Down Easy, Anna Deavere Smith interviewed people in the US and abroad who demonstrated grace in the face of dramatic challenges. The speech celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, the power of empathy, the strength of imagination, and hope.
Doing Time in Education: The School-to-Prison Pipeline
As research for her newest play and HBO special, Notes from the Field, Anna Deavere Smith created the Pipeline Project as a way to apply her signature form of documentary theater to investigate the school-to-prison pipeline — the cycle of suspension from school to incarceration that is prevalent among low-income Black, Brown, Latino, and Native-American youth.
Now more than ever, we need a moral reckoning of the challenges faced by minority youth and a radical shift in the policy conversations around this and other issues of social inequality. While developing this work, Smith conducted interviews with hundreds of people who are involved in the Pipeline at all levels: students, teachers, parents, police, thought and policy leaders, psychologists, community activists, and many more. If we are to change the system, we must change the conversation.
The Art of Communicating: Storytelling, Listening, and the Pathway to Connection
