Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, professor, and author. She is credited with having created a new form of theater, combining the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. Her series On the Road: A Search for American Character was developed through hundreds of interviews with people around the country impacted by conflicts around race and class, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Los Angeles Riots. These works earned her Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding One-Person Show in 1993 and 1994. She was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for her play Fires in the Mirror (1992), which chronicled the viewpoints of people from two different communities, Black and Jewish, connected to the Crown Heights, Brooklyn, crisis of 1991. Smith has been recognized by President Obama with the National Humanities Medal, along with MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and two Tony nominations, among other honors.
In 2026, the first workshop performances of Smith's historical drama Basil Biggs took place at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater during ArtPhilly's What Now: 2026 festival with the support of a Center project grant. In 2011, she appeared at Philadelphia Theatre Company as part of the American Playwrights in Context to speak about Let Me Down Easy, which focused on health care in the United States.
Smith is also an accomplished television and film actress, appearing in series such as Black-ish, Nurse Jackie and The West Wing and movies such as The American President, Rachel Getting Married, and Philadelphia. Her books include Letters to A Young Artist (2006) and Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines (2000). She is founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, a center for artistic excellence addressing social change, and a University Professor of Performance Studies at at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
