Join us for a screening of HBO's Notes From the Field followed by a Q&A with Anna Deavere Smith.
Moderated by Richard Ridge, Broadway World.
Estimated program end time: 9 PM
SYNOPSIS
This adaptation of Tony and Pulitzer Prize nominee Anna Deavere Smith’s acclaimed one-woman show dramatizes the accounts of students, parents, teachers and administrators caught in America’s school-to-prison pipeline, which pushes underprivileged, minority youth out of the classroom and into incarceration. Drawn from interviews with more than 250 people living and working within a challenged system, and featuring Smith’s fearless portrayals of 18 real-life characters, the film shines a light on a lost generation of American youth, hoping to inspire awareness and change. Executive produced by Gary Goetzman, Anna Deavere Smith; produced by Frank Garritano, Emily Cohen, Steven Shareshian; directed by Kristi Zea; written by Anna Deavere Smith.
PANELIST BIO
Anna Deavere Smith - Actor
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, author and activist. Her most recent play, Notes From the Field, looks at issues of education, racial inequality and incarceration. The New York Times named it among The Best Theater of 2016 and Time magazine named it as one of the Top 10 Plays of the year. It was filmed by HBO and garnered critical acclaim when it aired earlier this year.
Anna currently co-stars on the new ABC series For the People from Shonda Rhimes, which will return for a second season. She has also appeared as Rainbow’s mother Alicia on the hit ABC series Black-ish. She previously starred as Gloria Akalitus on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, and the National Security Advisor on NBC's The West Wing. Films include The American President, Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, Dave, Rent, and The Human Stain
In 2012, President Obama awarded her the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal. She was the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts. In 2015, she was named the Jefferson Lecturer, the nation’s highest honor in the humanities. She was nominated for two Tony Awards. She is the recipient of the 2017 Ridenhour Courage Prize. She is the 2017 recipient of the George Polk Career Award in journalism.
Looking at current events from multiple points of view, Smith's theater combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. These plays are part of a series that she began in the early 1980s called On the Road: A Search For American Character. Among the plays in the series are Fires In the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, House Arrest, and Let Me Down Easy. All of these plays address social issues. Twilight: Los Angeles was nominated for two Tony Awards. Fires in the Mirror was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.
Smith is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, which was launched at Harvard University and is now housed at New York University, where she is a Professor at Tisch School of the Arts.
She has been Artist in Residence at a wide variety of places, ranging from MTV Networks to the Ford Foundation to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
She has several honorary degrees and medals of recognition, among them from Juilliard, Barnard, Smith, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, The University of Pennsylvania, Cooper Union, Radcliffe College, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
She serves on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art, The Aspen Institute, The Yale School of Drama, The American Museum of Natural History, and the Playwrights Realm.
