Who is Anna Deavere Smith?

Anna Deavere Smith is a well-known actress, playwright, and professor who is known for her role in Dr. Nancy McNally in The West Wing, in the Showtime series Nurse Jackie as Gloria Akalitus, and For the People as Tina Krissman.

Anna was selected by National Endowment for the Humanities as the Jefferson Lecture in 2015.

Smith has also won Black Reel Award and Washington Dc Area Film Critics Association Awards. In 2022 Smith appeared in Inventing Anna as Maud.

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

Anna Deavere Smith: Age, Parents, Siblings, Ethnicity

Anna Deavere Smith was born on September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland, to an African-American family.

She is an American citizen, and because she is raised in an African American home, her ethnicity is likewise African American.

Anna was born to Anna Rosalind her mother who is an elementary school principal and her father Deaver Young Smith Jr who is a coffee merchant. She also has four siblings among whom she has only shared the name of Rosalind Allen.

Education, School, College

Anna Deavere Smith began attending the school shortly after the city began merging public schools, and she attended both majority-black and majority-white schools during her elementary years.

Smith is a graduate of the famous Western High School, an all-girls school.

Anna Deavere Smith previously attended Beaver College, which is now known as Arcadia University. She was one of seven African-American women in her 1971 graduating class at that college.

When Anna was in college, she began to recognize herself as Black. She eventually proceeded to the West Coast for graduate studies, earning an M.F.A in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.