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Born in 1950, child of 5, from Anna Young Smith and Deaver Young Smith Jr. Born in Baltimore, Maryland. She grew up in a Black working-class neighborhood and was exposed early to speech patterns and storytelling -
Completes high school at Western High School, a known all-girls public school in Baltimore. Her early education introduced her to different languages, how to perform and with public speaking. -
She later receives a Bachelor of Arts from Beaver College (now Arcadia University). She later gives credit to this period with going deeper into her interest in identity, language, and performance. -
She completed her MFA in Acting at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. This training shaped her experimental style which blended acting, interviewing and jounalism. -
She then starts teaching performance and acting at universities. Her teaching goes along with the early development of her signature verbatim-interview theater method. -
She begins traveling the U.S. interviewing hundreds of people from different backgrounds. These interviews became the basis for many of her documentary plays. -
The 1991 Crown Heights crisis in Brooklyn later inspired Smith’s play, Fires in the Mirror, which utilzes both interviews from both Jewish and Black community members. -
The 1992 LA riots became the foundation for her famous documentary play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. -
Smith debuts her playright "Fires in the Mirror", this was a solodomumentary preformance based on interviews about the Crown Heights conflict. This soon became a Pulizer Prize finalist. -
Smith premieres Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the play performed dozens of characters drawn from interviews. The play becomes a Pulitzer Prize finalist and major milestone within theater. -
She soon becomes a professor at New York University Tisch School of the arts, she taught performances and continuted her interview based reasearch. -
She is awarded with the prestigious Gish Prize for significant artistic contribution, this honored her outstanding innovations in documentary theatre -
Smith receives a MacArthur Fellowship recognizing her incredible work mixing journalism, theater, and ethnography. -
Smith debuts materia; for "let me down easy", this was a documentary play which explored illness, mortality and also human resilience through interviews. -
"let me down easy" opens at the New York Signature Theatre, later going national. -
While still being in theatrical events, Smith continued to act on the big screen. She presented herself in many shows, including Nurse Jackie (2009–15), and had roles on Black-ish and others. -
Smith receives the National Humanities medal from President Barack Obama for shaping how American understand race and identity through theater practice. -
The National Endowment for the Humanities soon selected Anna for the Jefferson Lecture which is considered the highest achievement with the humanities branch. -
After this in 2017, she finally premiered notes from the field and a powerful documentary playwright about the school to prison pipeline and sytemic racism. The school to prison pipeline project was a project to explore thesze topics and to push the idea out to the public how policies ar pushing students, specifically latnos and kids of color into criminal justice systems -
Anna Deavere Smith is still alive. Recently she launched a yearlong artist residency at the Wesleyan Universiry in late 2024 and continutes on into 2025. Shei is actively working and during this recency she developed a new play, "The Ghost of Slavery". She still remains a professor and still is a influential figure in theater. As of 2025 she remains unmarried and has no children, primeroly focusing on her career and creative projects.