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Home>Research>Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts>Meetings>A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts>Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me

# Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me

The 73rd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts presented by Anna Deavere Smith

**Sundays, April 28–May 19, 2024**

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Award-winning actress, playwright, and professor Anna Deavere Smith will explore performance as a way of knowing in this four-part series.

Anna Deavere Smith, Photo by Jeff Riedel

**Anna Deavere Smith** is a University Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts. In 2012 President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal. In 2015 she was named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the nation’s highest honor in the field. She was the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts, and of the Ridenhour Courage Prize and the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, both in 2017. Smith has also been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and for two Tony Awards. She is the recipient of several honorary doctorates, including from University of Oxford, Spelman College, Yale University, Harvard University, and the Juilliard School.

Smith has created over 15 one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews. In 2016 her play *Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education* looked at the vulnerability of youth, inequality, the criminal justice system, and contemporary activism. Her play *Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992* was recently named one of the best plays of the last 25 years by the* New York Times*. She has appeared on the television shows *Black-ish*, *For the People*, *Nurse Jackie*, *Inventing Anna*, and *The West Wing*; and the films *The American President*, *Philadelphia*, and *Rachel Getting Married*.

# Watch the Lectures

Since 1980, Anna Deavere Smith has been interviewing Americans through her project “On the Road: A Search for American Character,” which she developed into a new form of theater. Delivered with segments of performance, these lectures will examine this material collected over the course of Smith’s career.

Conceived as a sequel to her 2015 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Smith’s Mellon Lectures will continue to explore performance as a way of knowing about others—and herself—with a new lens.

I. Sunday, April 28On the Road: A Search for American Character

II. Sunday, May 5This Ghost of Slavery: A Solo Reading

III. Sunday, May 12Let Me Down Easy: On the Vulnerability of Our Bodies / The Resilience of Our Spirits

IV. Sunday, May 19Me: Shot Out of a Moving Canon—Black, Female, and the 1970s

The Mellon Lectures
Inaugurated in 1949, the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts is the longest-running lecture series at the National Gallery of Art. The series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” Past lecturers have included art historians, artists, poets, and musicologists.
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