PROFILE
Playwright, actor and professor Anna Deavere Smith, hailed by Newsweek as “the most exciting individual in American theatre,” uses her singular brand of theatre to explore issues of community, character and diversity in America. She was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellowship for creating “a new form of theatre — a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism and intimate reverie.”
Smith has a recurring role on the new Showtime series Nurse Jackie, played National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s The West Wing, and has appeared in such films as Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia and The American President. She is perhaps best known as the author and performer of two one-woman plays about racial tensions in America — Fires in the Mirror (Obie Award-winner and runner-up for the Pulitzer) and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (Obie-winner and Tony Award nominee). Interviewing subjects from all walks of life, Smith recreates their words in performance, transforming herself into an astonishing number of characters. Both of these plays featured Smith performing multiple characters and won her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show two years in a row.
Smith has received a multitude of honorary degrees from schools such as Arcadia University, Smith College, Skidmore College, Wesleyan University, Northwestern University, U.N.C., Bates College, and the Pratt Institute. In 2006 she won a Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which recognized her contribution to civil rights issues, as well as a Matrix Award from the New York Women In Communications, Inc. In 2009 Smith also won a Fellow Award in Theatre Arts for the United States Artists.
Smith founded the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue at Harvard University in 1997. The Institute is now known as Anna Deavere Smith Works. Currently, Smith is a tenured professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts teaching performance studies; she is also affiliated with the NYU School of Law.
Her latest book is Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts. Her most recent play, Let Me Down Easy, which explores the resilience and vulnerability of the human body, opened on Off-Broadway's Second Stage Theatre in 2009 and broadcast on PBS in January 2012. She is currently researching a new play she is writing called The Americans at the Center for American Progress as Artist-in-Residence.
“She was PHENOMENAL! She was so gracious and wonderful and gave so much of herself.... She brought down the house.”
-YWCA of the Hartford Region
