Anna+Smith

__ANNA SMITH__ Anna Smith was a native of Baltimore. She was born Sept. 18, 1950, and the oldest of her five siblings. Her father owned a coffee and tea business, and her mother was an elementary school principal.

Anna went to college at Beaver College in Pennsylvania in 1971 and also got a M.F.A ( Master of Fine Arts) in 1976 from the American Conservatory Theatre. Ms. Smith worked as an actress and director in theaters in San Francisco before moving to New York City in 1977. The following year, she was hired as a drama teacher at Carnegie-Mellon.University. Ms. Smith has taught at Stanford University as a tenured professor; she has also taught at New York University, Yale University, and the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, and other schools.

Ms. Smith is an author as well as an actor. Two of her plays are "Fires in the Mirror" and "Twilight: Los Angeles 1992." "Fires in the Mirror," was inspired by the 1991 accidental killing of a 7-year-old black child, Gavin Cato, by a Hasidic driver. Ms. Smith wrote this piece, giving voice to many political, cultural and racial viewpoints.

QUOTES FROM ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: "We should do what we can to try to make the presence of love clearer" "I find my way to San Francisco, and by fluke, I'm in this acting class one day and I'm thinking, 'People are changing! So maybe I should learn about //this//—how to change a //person//, before I start to think about social change" "And then I kind of just got sucked into that whole thing and that's how I became an actress." "These dreams tell me, oh, you're really working now. You're getting ready to be very, very creative."

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