Conversations on Compassion with Anna Deavere Smith

This is an Archive of a Past Event

About The Event

In this public conversation, CCARE’s founder and director, Dr. James Doty, will host actor and NYU professor Anna Deavere Smith for a dialogue about her life’s work and what role compassion may play. Free registration is required for access to seating before the event starts. Doors open to registered attendees at 5:40PM. Walk-ins are also welcome and will be offered any unclaimed seats just after the event starts. Please note the event will NOT be recorded.

About Anna

Actress, playwright, and teacher, Anna Deavere Smith is said to have created a new form of theater. She received the National Humanities Medal, presented to her by President Obama in 2013. She was the 2015 Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and received The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. She is recipient of two Tony nominations, and two Obie awards. She was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for her play Fires in the Mirror. She has created over 15 one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews, most of which deal with social issues. Twilight: Los Angeles, about the Los Angeles race riots of 1992, was performed around the country and on Broadway. Let Me Down Easy focused on health care in the U.S. Her current work-in-progress, the Anna Deavere Smith Pipeline Project, examines the school to prison pipeline. In popular culture you have seen her in Nurse Jackie, Black-ish, The West Wing, The American President, Rachel Getting Married, and Philadelphia. Books include Letters to a Young Artist and Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines. Honorary degrees include those from Yale, Juilliard, the University of Pennsylvania, Barnard, Radcliffe, Wesleyan, Williams, and Northwestern. She is University Professor at New York University, where she also directs the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.