Since 1980, Anna Deavere Smith has interviewed hundreds of Americans and created more than fifteen one-person shows, as part of a project through which she has been credited with establishing a new form of theatre that combines journalistic techniques of interviewing subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance.
In November’s Balliol Online Lecture, where we focus on a subject that coincides with the North American holidays, Professor Smith will discuss her multi-decade project listening between the lines while travelling across America, developing an ear in order to develop a voice, public figures and private identities, character and stereotypes, performance and knowing. The lecture is taken from excerpts of Smith’s four-part 2024 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me, which were delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author, who currently serves as Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and on President Biden’s Committee for Arts and Humanities. Her play This Ghost of Slavery was recently featured in Atlantic Magazine, one of only two published by the magazine during its 167 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 riots, named one of the best plays of the last 25 years by The New York Times. As an actress in popular culture, Smith has performed in Netflix’s Inventing Anna, ABC’s For the People and Black-ish, Nurse Jackie and The West Wing, alongside feature films including The American President, Philadelphia and Rachel Getting Married.
Smith was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama; the MacArthur Genius Fellowship; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; the George Polk Career Award; the Dean’s Medal of Stanford Medical School; plus several Obie awards together with nominations for Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. She was selected to give the 2015 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities at the John F Kennedy Centre and to be the 73rd A.W. Mellon Lecturer in Fine Arts at the National Gallery in 2024.
She holds several honorary degrees from universities and colleges including the University of Oxford, where she held the George Eastman Visiting Professorship and the associated Visiting Fellowship at Balliol during Michaelmas Term 2023.
