Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950) is an American actress, playwright, and professor.

Smith was born in 1950 into an African-American family in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Anna Rosalind (née Young), an elementary school principal, and Deaver Young Smith Jr., a coffee merchant.

She has four younger siblings.

She started attending school shortly after the city had started integrating the public schools, and attended both majority-black and majority-white schools during her lower years.

Smith is an alumna of the historic Western High School, an all-girls school.

Smith studied acting at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), where she was one of seven African-American women in her class, graduating in 1971.

During her college career, she started to identify as Black.

Later she went to the West Coast for graduate work, receiving an M.F.A. in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.

At the beginning of her career, Smith appeared in a wide range of stage productions, including the role of Mistress Quickly in an Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor with the Riverside Shakespeare Company, produced by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival.

This production was set in New Orleans in post-Civil War America.

For the role, Smith transformed herself into a "Cajun voodoo woman."

She used her ability to take on other characters in her future work.

From being in a variety of situations and in a kind of outsider status, she was a close observer of people and their language.

She later told Henry Louis Gates Jr.., when appearing on his show Finding Your Roots, that she had difficulty getting jobs at the beginning of her acting career because people did not know how to categorize her in terms of ethnicity for casting.

She interviewed more than 100 people as part of her creation of Fires in the Mirror, which dealt with the 1991 Crown Heights riot.

Smith is best known as a playwright and actress for her "documentary theatre" style, also called verbatim theatre, in plays such as Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993).

Both featured Smith as the sole performer of multiple and diverse characters, based on interviews she had conducted with numerous residents and commentators in the two cities where riots took place.

For these works, she won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show two years in a row.

In 1992, she interviewed some 300 people as part of her research for creating Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which dealt with the 1992 Los Angeles riots after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, in events captured on tape.

Both of these plays were constructed using material solely from interviews.

Smith has appeared in several films, including Philadelphia (1993), Dave (1993), The American President (1995), Rent (2005), and Rachel Getting Married (2008).

She is known for her roles as National Security Advisor Dr. Nancy McNally in The West Wing (2000–06), hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus in the Showtime series Nurse Jackie (2009–15), and as U.S. District Court Clerk Tina Krissman on the ABC show For the People (2018–19).

Smith's plays House Arrest (2000) and Let Me Down Easy (2008) were also created in this style.

She had recurring roles in the TV series The Practice (2000) and as Dr. Nancy McNally on The West Wing (2000–06).

Let Me Down Easy, which explored the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body, debuted at the Long Wharf Theatre in January 2008.

It was also performed at the American Repertory Theater in September and October 2008.

Smith debuted her one-woman play The Arizona Project in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2008.

The piece, which explored "women's relationships to justice and the law," was commissioned by Bruce Ferguson, director of Future Arts Research (F.A.R.), a new artist-driven research program at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

A revised version of the show had its New York City premiere Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre in October 2009.

In 2009, Smith was an artist-in-residence with the Center for American Progress.

Smith also appeared as hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus in the Showtime dark comedy series Nurse Jackie, which premiered in June 2009.

Early in her television career, she appeared on the long-running soap opera All My Children in the recurring role of "Hazel the shampoo girl".

It enjoyed favorable reviews and an extension into January 2010.

It was a featured program as part of PBS's Great Performances series on January 13, 2012.

In Spring 2012, Smith was the first artist-in-residence at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, a program founded by the Very Rev Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral, who shared Smith's vision of "bringing together art and religion".

Commissioned by Grace Cathedral and the Cockayne Fund, Smith wrote and performed the play, On Grace, based on interviews relating to the meaning of God's grace.

The performances were accompanied by American cellist Joshua Roman.

Smith is a recipient of The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2013).

In 2015 she was selected as the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University.