ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

Anna Deavere Smith is a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize nominated writer, performer, and professor.  She is best known for her "documentary theatre" style in plays such as Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, both of which featured Smith as the sole performer of multiple and diverse characters, focusing on the circumstances of the two highly publicized riots. Both of these plays were constructed using material solely from interviews and archival pieces. House Arrest in 2000 and Let Me Down Easy in 2008 continue in this style.

Ms. Smith was last seen in performance at the A.R.T. in the sold-out run of Fires in the Mirror in 1992.  In 1998, aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation, she created the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue at Harvard under the joint sponsorship of the A.R.T. and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Studies. The three-year program explored ways in which artists from all disciplines, in association with scholars and community leaders, can enhance public discussions of vital social issues.  The Institute convened during the summers of 1998, 1999, and 2000 in Cambridge.

She appeared in several films, including Jonathan Demme’s upcoming film Rachel Getting Married, as well as The Human Stain, Philadelphia, and The American President, and had recurring roles on The West Wing and The Practice.  As a dramatist Smith was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fires in the Mirror, which won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show.  She was nominated for Best Actress and Best Play Tony Awards in 1994 for Twilight; it won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance and a Theatre World Award.  Smith was one of the 1996 recipients of a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."  She also won a 2006 Fletcher Foundation Fellowship for her contribution to civil rights issues as well as a 2008 Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications. Inc.

Smith teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and also teaches at NYU School of Law. In 2000 Smith published her first book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics.  In 2006 she released another, Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.

Let Me Down Easy was first produced as series of staged readings at the Zachary Scott Theatre in Austin, followed by a production last winter at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.