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ANNA DEAVERE SMITH TO ADDRESS BARNARD GRADS: School chooses famed actress as commencement speaker.
*Actress, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith, last seen playing the mother of Queen Latifah’s character in the recent HBO film “Life Support,” has been named the commencement speaker for Barnard College's Class of 2007.
Smith first gained national attention 15 years ago for her groundbreaking one-woman documentary plays Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, for which she conducted interviews about controversial topics and then portrayed her interviewees, speaking their words, in her performance.
The 56-year-old talent has also played National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC's "The West Wing" and co-starred in the CBS drama "Presidio Med." She has also appeared in the films "The Human Stain," "Philadelphia," "Dave" and "The American President" and on TV's "The Practice."
When she’s not in front of a camera or on stage, Smith serves as a tenured professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and is affiliated with the NYU School of Law, where she teaches a course on "The Art of Listening."
She has also authored several books, and in 1998, in association with the Ford Foundation, founded the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue at Harvard (now at New York University).
Barnard will also award Smith with its Medal of Distinction during the graduation ceremony, along with playwright Joan Didion and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has mentored his research assistant Winter Miller as she has written her play In Darfur.
The ceremony will take place at 2:30 p.m. on May 15 on Barnard's Lehman Lawn in upper Manhattan.
