RaMell Ross and Anna Deavere Smith: Discussion and Screening of Nickel Boys

Friday, April 11, 2025 at 7:00pm
Goldsmith Family Cinema, The Jeanine Basinger Center for Film Studies, 301 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut

Free and open to the public.

Produced in partnership with Wesleyan's DDC (Digital Design Commons) Productions, this event will feature filmmaker RaMell Ross and playwright, actor, and educator Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97, the 2024–2025 CFA Artist in Residence. Ross and Smith will begin the evening with a discussion, followed by a screening of Ross' Academy Award-nominated film Nickel Boys (2024).

Read This Sense of Somebody-ness, Anna Deavere Smith's review of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys from The New York Review of Books. 

Smith’s participation is made possible through the Center for the Arts’ Artist in Residence program. Learn more about Anna Deavere Smith's artist residency at Wesleyan.

Presented by Wesleyan University’s Digital Design Commons, DDC Productions, the College of Film and the Moving Image, and the Center for the Arts.

RaMell Ross is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, a USA Artist Fellowship, and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University. Ross' feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and 2020 Peabody Award. The documentary was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards, and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. Ross' film Nickel Boys was nominated for Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards, and has received top prizes from many film critic associations, including the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Association, and the Gotham Awards. Ross holds degrees in Sociology and English from Georgetown University, and is an Associate Professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. His work is in various public and private collections including the Museum for Modern Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the High Museum.

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.