Anna Deavere Smith was born in the year 1950 and she is a professor, playwright and American actress. She is now artist-in-residence of Center for American Progress. She is known for the role she had like a National Security Advisor in The West Wing under the name of Dr Nancy McNally. He was a hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus in Nurse Jackie, A Showtime series. She got The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. This is among the highest prize at American Arts and it has remuneration of 300,000 dollars and she was named a Jefferson Lecturer in 2015.
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From her biography, Anna Deavere was born in the city of Baltimore in Maryland. Her parents are Rosalind, who was elementary school principal and her father is Deaver Young Smith Jr who was a coffee merchant. She was born with four siblings, younger to her and she attended Western High School. She did acting from Beaver College known as Arcadia University now and graduated in the year 1971. She got a M.F.A of acting with American Conservatory Theater based in San Francisco in California.
At the beginning, Anna Deaver was appearing in the stage productions like Mistress Quickly and The Merry Wives of Windsor of Shakespeare. She was transformed into a Cajun Voodoo woman and it was indication of his transformation power which had to manifest itself in the future work. Anna Deavere is known for his documentary theatre style in the plays such as Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror. She was a sole performer of many characters and she was a Drama Desk Award winner for being an outstanding One-Person Show for two consecutive years. The Fires in the Mirror were based at Crown Heights Riot of 1991 while Twilight: Los Angeles was based in the Los Angeles riots of 1992,. These plays were based on the interview materials. She also continued with Let Me Down Easy and House arrest.
Anna Deavere appeared in many films and they include Rachel Getting Married, The America President and Philadelphia. She had a role in The West Wing and in Practice. She is a teacher at Tisch School of Arts based in New York University since 1990 until 2000. She was teaching drama at the Stanford University before she starts to teach at Carnegie Mellon University and she was also teaching at NYU School of Law.
She is an author of the book Talk to ME: Travels in Media and Politics. In the year 2006, she also authored another book called Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in The Arts for actors, Performers, Writers and Artists of Every Kind. When it comes to her personal life, Anna Deavere was never married. For her ethnicity, she is African-American while her net worth is not recorded. She was nominated for Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she won a Drama Desk Award among other nominations and awards.
Last Modified: Mar 12, 2020
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