11th Annual Conference

OPENING KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Anna Deavere Smith

Performance artist and actress Anna Deavere Smith has quickly established herself as one of America's leading creative thinkers, and one of its most insightful dramatists. Her work generates passionate discussions wherever she performs, her subject matter is consistently controversial, and audiences rarely stay quiet. The creative power of Smith's work, critics say, is in its ability to choose the words and the people through which to faithfully reflect an America "that doesn't appear on the evening news." A non-traditional playwright, her novel approach involves less character creation from imagination, than the adaptation from personal interviews that capture subtle nuances lost to other observers. Said the Boston Globe: "Anna Deavere Smith not only reveals the content of their characters but the substance of their souls." Smith's blend of theatrical art, journalism and social commentary is credited with helping to create a new form of theater, and won Smith a $280,000 "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1996. Her most well-known plays are "Fires in the Mirror," about the riots between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and "Twilight: Los Angeles," about the Los Angeles riots. In both of those plays, Smith performed all of the voices and characters of her interviewees. Another critically acclaimed work by Smith is "House Arrest: First Edition," which explored the relationship between the press and the presidency, and was a part of her series of performances that began in the early 1980s called "On the Road: A Search for the American Character." In 1996, she worked as a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine covering the 1996 presidential campaign. In 1998, she was named director of Harvard's new Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.