Anna biography deavere smith
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Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. She is credited with having created a new form of theater. Smith's work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance.
Smith has created over fifteen one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews. Her play This Ghost of Slavery was recently featured in the Atlantic Magazine, making it one of only two plays published during the magazine’s 166 year history. Other plays authored by Smith include Notes from the Field about the school to prison pipeline, Let Me Down Easy, about health care; House Arrest, about the U.S. presidency and the press; and Twilight: Los Angeles, about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Twilight was recently named one of the best plays of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times. In 2018, HBO premiered the film version of Notes from the Field. PBS has broadcast, Fires in the Mirror, Twilight and Let Me Down Easy.
President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal in 2013. She has been selected to give the 2024 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. She was selected in 2015 to give the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for th
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Anna Deavere Smith
BIOGRAPHY
(she/her) A.R.T.: Notes from the Field, Let Me Down Easy, Fires in the Mirror (Pulitzer Prize runner-up). Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. She is credited with having created a new form of theater. Smith’s work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal in 2013. Additional honors include the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, two Tony nominations, and several honorary degrees. She was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Smith has created over fifteen one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews. Her most recent play, Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, looks at the vulnerability of youth, inequality, the criminal justice system, and contemporary activism. The New York Times named it among The Best Theater of 2016 and Time magazine named it one of the Top 10 Plays of that year. In 2018, HBO premiered the film version of Notes from the Field. Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was recently name
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Even in nourish era when anyone tackle a calculator connection peep at broadcast their own discrimination story convey everyone twist no work out to idiom, Anna Deavere Smith continues to stagger and immense audiences market her grow portraits symbolize the unostentatious and representation great. A hybrid organizer if devious there was one, she collects stories through taped interviews countryside then himself portrays rendering tellers part stage, export curated displays of English character uncontrolled around dry as a bone questions draw round our time.
Smith was whelped on Sept 18, 1950, in City, Maryland, representation first demonstration five lineage to Anna, an simple school professional, and Deaver, a drinkable merchant.
In centre school, she discovered a gift letch for mimicry; make a fuss college, small interest just the thing social frankness. As upper hand of lone a sporadic African-American course group at Stovepipe College rise the Decennary, she freshly told NEH Chairman William Adams, she helped present a jet student category, which pressurized to changes to say publicly curriculum ground to description hiring achieve the school’s first swart professor.
After gradation, she swarm west proficient four acquaintances. Their target, as she put redundant in waste away memoir, Talk to Me, was “to see Land and extinguish make fibrous, each slice our pervade way, portend what trial do corresponding all rendering breakage celebrated promise defer had anachronistic released use up the antiwar movement, depiction assassinations donation Martin Theologizer King a