Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.) is an American playwright, actress, author, journalist, and educator, who is best known for her one-woman plays that examine the social issues behind current events.
Smith was raised in a racially segregated middle-class section of Baltimore. She was a shy child who nonetheless developed a talent for mimicry. She studied linguistics at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) near Philadelphia, earning a B.A. (1971) before moving to San Francisco to study acting at the American Conservatory Theatre, where she earned an M.F.A. degree (1977). The following year she took a position teaching drama (1978–79) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While there, Smith explored methods for actors to create characters by studying real people engaged in actual conversations. Inspired by her research, she launched her own ongoing project, On the Road: A Search for American Character. She later taught at the University of Southern California (1986–89) and at Stanford University (1990–2000).
In addition to landing a role on the television soap opera All My Children, Smith wrote and performed several well-received plays as part of the On the Road project. Her breakthrough work was Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), which told the story of the racial tension that rocked the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn following an incident in 1991 in which the car of a Hasidic Jew went out of control and hit and killed an African American child. Smith crafted the play from her own in-depth interviews, and she performed all 29 roles, moving seamlessly from one character to the next. The show received high critical praise and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 her next offering, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, was a similarly crafted exploration of the violence that erupted after the acquittal of four white police officers charged in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, an African American.
In 2000 Smith joined the faculty at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In 2008 she premiered a one-woman play, Let Me Down Easy, which explored the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body. Smith portrayed more than 20 characters, who spoke out about current events such as genocide in Rwanda, steroid use among athletes, AIDS in Africa, and the U.S. health care system. Another one-woman play, Notes from the Field (2016), explored the “pipeline” from school to prison for poor students in the United States. It was later adapted into a TV movie (2018), in which Smith also starred in a variety of roles.
While engaging in theatrical and academic pursuits, Smith continued to act on-screen. She appeared in several television shows, including Nurse Jackie (2009–15), and had recurring roles on The West Wing and Black-ish, among others. She also performed in such films as Dave (1993), The American President (1995), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Rachel Getting Married (2008), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and Flora & Ulysses (2021).
Smith was the author of Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (2000) and Letters to a Young Artist (2006). She was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (a “genius grant”) in 1996, and she received the National Humanities Medal in 2013.