This Ghost of Slavery: Anna Deavere Smith and Scott Stossel in conversation on a play past and present
NYU Tisch Professor Anna Deavere Smith and Atlantic Magazine editor Scott Stossel will discuss the process of writing her new play "This Ghost of Slavery" for a magazine, as compared to working through the current theatre based play development process. They will also discuss the use of extensively mined primary and secondary source historical materials.
Space is limited, RSVP is required.
Anna Deavere Smith
Actress, playwright, teacher. Credited with having created a new form of theater.
Her play This Ghost of Slavery was recently featured in the Atlantic Magazine, making it one of only two plays published during the magazine’s 166-year history. Other plays: Notes from the Field, Let Me Down Easy, House Arrest, and Twilight: Los Angeles, Fires in the Mirror. HBO and PBS have produced and broadcast her plays.
President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal (2013). Other awards include: Two Tony nominations, runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Obie Awards, George Polk Career Award in Journalism, The Dean’s Medal from Stanford University Medical School. Smith was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame (2021). Honorary degrees include: Oxford, Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Spelman, Dartmouth, Prairie View University, and Juilliard.
As an actress - Television: Inventing Anna, For the People, Black-ish, Nurse Jackie, The West Wing. Films: The American President, Philadelphia, Ghosted, Rachel Getting Married.
She serves on Biden’s President’s Committee for the Arts and the Humanities. In 2023, she was Eastman Professor at Oxford University – Balliol College. She is a University Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is the 2024 A.W. Mellon Lecturer in Fine Arts at the National Gallery, Washington D.C.
Scott Stossel
Scott Stossel is the National Editor of The Atlantic, where he has formerly served as senior editor, managing editor, deputy editor, editor of the magazine, and editorial director for new media. Articles and essays and podcasts he has edited have won multiple Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and Peabody Awards, and have been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, Best American Political Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, among others. He was the editor of the piece determined by judges at NYU's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute to have been the "Top Work of Journalism of the Decade"—Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations"--and has edited pieces by Nobel Laureates, sitting and former American presidents, and CEOs, as well as many first-time authors. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind and Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver, and his essays and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Daily Beast, and numerous other publications.