About Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith is probably most recognizable in popular culture as Gloria Akalitus on Showtime’s hit series Nurse Jackie, or as Nancy McNally, national security advisor on NBC’s former hit The West Wing. Yet, her work in the theater has been a central part of her artistic life. It has been said that she created a new form of theater.
Anna Deavere Smith Biography
When granted the prestigious MacArthur Award, her work was described as “a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism, and intimate reverie.” Ms. Smith’s theater combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. These one-woman shows are a part of a series she began in the early 1980s called On the Road: A Search for American Character. A reviewer for The New York Times, writing about her Broadway show Twilight: Los Angeles, which depicted the 1992 Los Angeles riots, said of her performance that she’s “the ultimate impressionist: she does people’s souls.” Jack Kroll of Newsweek proclaimed the work “an American masterpiece.”
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Her most recent work Let Me Down Easy deals with the subject of health care. It ran for six months at New York’s Second Stage Theater, and then toured for nine months around the US. Its PBS broadcast (January 2012) is a part of PBS’s arts initiative.
Anna Deavere Smith has received two Tony nominations, an Obie, Drama Desk Award, Special Citation from the New York Drama Critics Circle, and numerous other honors.
She has been featured in several films, among them The American President, The Human Stain, Life Support, and Rachel Getting Married.
She produced, wrote, and performed the film version of Twilight for PBS. Another of her plays, Fires in the Mirror, which examined a race riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (1991) was also created as a film for PBS.
Anna Deavere Smith is author of Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines and Letters to a Young Artist (Random House). She has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Yorker, OMagazine, Elle, Essence, and The Drama Review as well as other publications.
She has been invited to be and served as Artist in Residence in diverse environments: The Ford Foundation, MTV Networks, The Aspen Institute, the Center for American Progress, and Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.
Anna Deavere Smith has several honorary degrees including those from Juilliard, The School of Visual Arts, University of Pennsylvania (2012), Wesleyan, Radcliffe, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Barnard, Simmons College, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others.
Also, Anna Deavere Smith is a University Professor at New York University.
About Anna Deavere Smith Works
Anna Deavere Smith Works, Inc. (ADS Works) founded by actress, playwright, and educator Anna Deavere Smith, cultivates artistic excellence that embraces the social issues of the day. It is a place for artistic excellence and social change. We host conferences and events that bring together artists, thinkers and activists across disciplines.
We find common ground among dancers and musicians, painters and sculptors, playwrights and actors representing many distinct styles and genres. Part of a global initiative, we are stretching across the boundaries of class, nation, and culture to fashion community among the creators and consumers of art. We are connecting artists to the intellectuals, activists and policy makers who illuminate some of the world’s most pressing problems.
ADS Works, a “chosen institute” of the Provost’s office at New York University, is increasingly viewed as a global leader in linking art and civic stewardship as a potent force for change. Over the past 15 years, we have convened renowned artists and interacted with audiences in novel ways to examine such compelling issues as Arab Spring, the Haitian earthquake, ethnic cleansing, culturally bound ideas about beauty, how to invigorate artist communities in environments where they are not traditionally cultivated, and many more.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create an international community of artists and thinkers – to convene – to share work – to produce new works – to inspire new models for how art is created, exhibited, marketed, shared. We seek to affect the ways that the new generation of artists are trained: combining both virtuosity and excellence with content that responds to the immediate and current world.
Building on the powerful theatrical form that Anna Deavere Smith has invented and nurtured, and her commitment to using that form to address social issues, we are revisiting assumptions about where artists belong and their role in civic discourse. At the same time, we are galvanizing vulnerable communities and empowering them to author their own narratives and help solve the problems they confront daily.
Anna Deavere Smith Works History
ADS Works was founded by actress/playwright/teacher Anna Deavere Smith in the late 1990’s with a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation. Three summers of activities were hosted at Harvard University. Several new works were produced in all genres, with the idea that nascent works could be enriched by early contact with audiences if the subject matter, rather than form, was the focus. The summers were filled with robust conversations around such issues as gun control, beauty, policing, genocide, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, and many more. Artists ranged from very accomplished artists like Art Spiegleman, the Girls Choir of Harlem, to those who were iconic in the avant garde such as Ping Chong, to those who were newer to their fields. Intellectual participation was abundant. Any given evening included such visitors as Lewis Hyde, Martha Minow, Lani Guinier, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates.
Our overriding question was “What do you gain or lose when you come out of the safety of your studio to engage in civic events?”. Since that time, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the rise of social entrepreneurship, increased globalization of the marketplace, and the explosion in social networking and technology, we see a global surge of artists who want to combine meticulous discipline and abundant creative energy in their given form with a desire to make a difference where things are not quite right in the world. There is no longer the strict dividing line between art which is successful as good “art” and art that seeks to speak up and out.