Anna Deavere Smith: Spark of Desire

In October 2024, Wesleyan's Center for the Arts welcomed acclaimed playwright, actor, and educator Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97 as their 2024–2025 Artist in Residence. During her residency, Smith hosted workshops with students and faculty and continued to develop her dramatic work, This Ghost of Slavery: A Play of Past and Present, originally published in The Atlantic. In this video from Wesleyan University Magazine, Smith and collaborators reflect on her time at Wesleyan and using performance as a way of deepening our capacity to listen to ourselves and to each other.