On Mentorship: Public Discussion with Anna Deavere Smith and Samora Pinderhughes
Friday, January 24, 2025 at 7:00pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Free and open to the public.
Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest, but reservations are not required.
Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97, the 2024–2025 CFA Artist in Residence, will engage in a discussion about art, civic engagement, art’s role in healing the wounds of history, and the importance of intergenerational mentorship with musician and composer Samora Pinderhughes.
One of the most important relationships artists can have is to each other. In this conversation, Smith and Pinderhughes will explore the history and meaning of their relationship as mentor/mentee, and how they nurture similar reciprocal relations in the worlds they create through their individual arts practices.
Smith is continuing to develop her most recent play, This Ghost of Slavery (originally published in The Atlantic, December 2023). Samora Pinderhughes recently released his latest album, Venus Smiles Not In The House of Tears, while continuing to serve as creator and executive and artistic director of The Healing Project, a massive multidisciplinary project which was recently awarded a $1 million dollar grant from The Mellon Foundation that explores through art the question: what if we built our world around healing?
Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship, as well as large projects that use music to examine sociopolitical issues. The New York Times describes Pinderhughes as “one of the most affecting singer-songwriters today, in any genre” that “turn(s) the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated.” Pinderhughes has collaborated with artists across boundaries and scenes including Common, Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon '82, Hon. '12, Sara Bareilles, Robert Glasper, Simone Leigh, Daveed Diggs, Kyle Abraham, Titus Kaphar, and Lalah Hathaway.Pinderhughes has been mentored by Anna Deavere Smith, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, and others. Pinderhughes has toured internationally with Branford Marsalis, Christian Scott, and Emily King. Pinderhughes is the first-ever Art for Justice + Soros Justice Fellow, a United States Artist Fellow, a recipient of Chamber Music America’s Visionary Award, and has received awards from Creative Capital, the Kennedy Center, and Sundance. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School and is currently getting his PhD at Harvard University. Pinderhughes has released the musical projects The Transformations Suite, Black Spring EP, and GRIEF.
Anna Deavere Smith is a University Professor at New York University. President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal (2012), and she was named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2015). She has received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2013), the Ridenhour Courage Prize, and the George Polk Career Award in Journalism (both 2017). Smith has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and for two Tony Awards. Smith has created over fifteen one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews, including the widely celebrated Twilight: Los Angeles (1992). She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Oxford, Spelman College, Yale University, Harvard University, and the Juilliard School (among others). Her television credits include Black-ish, For the People, Nurse Jackie, Inventing Anna, and The West Wing; and her films include The American President, Philadelphia, and Rachel Getting Married.
Read Anna Deavere Smith Starts Yearlong Artist Residency in The Wesleyan Connection.
“This is a performance class. The body knows,” writes Smith, who will lead a workshop, “Performance as a Way of Knowing” from Tuesday, January 21 through Saturday, January 25, 2025 using performance exercises developed over decades of teaching and drawing on her verbatim-theater method to invite twelve participants to become acquainted with parts of themselves and of each other that may not be obvious. Wesleyan University undergraduate students who are passionate leaders, interested in civic engagement, and concerned to find ways of communicating across our differences, were invited to apply. The goal is not necessarily to produce artists, but to explore how the arts are essential to being agents of change in the world. The work will also explore worlds and circumstances that, on first glance, appear to be far from the “self.”
Learn more about Anna Deavere Smith's artist residency at Wesleyan.
Photo of Anna Deavere Smith by Mark Brendel, Perceptions Photography.