In Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith - Annual David M. Rubenstein Lecture

Anna Deavere Smith joins David Rubenstein in conversation at the third Annual David M. Rubenstein Lecture, the final event of the 2019 Induction Weekend. Following a presentation by Anna Deavere Smith, the two discuss her life, work, and inspiration.
Held on Sunday, October 13, 2019, the Rubenstein Lecture served as the 2084th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
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Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. She is credited with having created a new form of theater. Her work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. She has created over fifteen one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews. Her most recent play, Notes from the Field, looks at the vulnerability of youth, inequality, the criminal justice system, and contemporary activism. The New York Times named it among The Best Theater of 2016 and Time magazine named it one of the Top 10 Plays of that year. In 2018, HBO premiered the film version of Notes from the Field. Her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was recently named one of the best plays of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times. She has appeared on television programs, including Shonda Rhimes’s For the People, Black-ish, Nurse Jackie, and The West Wing. Her film work includes roles in The American President, Philadelphia, RENT, and Rachel Getting Married. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2013. Additional honors include a MacArthur Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, a Ridenhour Courage Prize, and the Dean’s Medal from the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her work has received two Tony nominations and she was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. She is a University Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts and the Founding Director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
David M. Rubenstein is a Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman of The Carlyle Group. He served as Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments before becoming the Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the Carter administration. He also practiced law in both New York City and Washington, D.C. He is Chairman of the Boards of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations; a Fellow of the Harvard Corporation; a Trustee of the National Gallery of Art, the University of Chicago, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Brookings Institution, and the World Economic Forum; and President of the Economic Club of Washington, among other board seats and memberships. He is an original signer of The Giving Pledge, and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award, among other philanthropic awards. He is the host of "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations." He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 and serves as a member of the Academy’s Board of Directors.
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