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Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith has built a career around the close observation of people: how they speak, what they reveal and how language shifts depending on who holds the room. Born in Baltimore in 1950, she studied acting at Beaver College, now Arcadia University, before earning an MFA from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Her early stage work included Mistress Quickly in an Off-Broadway production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. That ability to inhabit sharply different characters became central to her documentary, or verbatim, theatre. For Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Smith conducted extensive interviews and transformed the resulting words into one-person performances featuring multiple voices. The plays examined the Crown Heights riot and the 1992 Los Angeles riots, respectively, and each earned her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show. She continued using interview-based forms in works including House Arrest and Let Me Down Easy. On screen, Smith brings the same attentive, grounded presence to roles that often place her near institutions of power. Her film appearances include Philadelphia, Dave, The American President, Rent, Rachel Getting Married and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, in which she played a literature professor. Television audiences may know her as Dr. Nancy McNally on The West Wing or hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus on Nurse Jackie. She also had a recurring role on The Practice and appeared as Maud in Inventing Anna. Smith’s work extends beyond performance. She has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California and Stanford University, and teaches in New York University’s Department of Art & Public Policy as well as at NYU School of Law. She is also an author and playwright whose projects repeatedly return to public life, identity and the complicated distance between what people mean and what they manage to say.