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Ananda Lewis, Television personality
Address: c/o The Insider, Paramount Domestic Television,
5555 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, CA 90038
"Ananda is a refreshing splash of realness in the
agonizingly synthetic youth market," a reporter for askmen.com wrote of
the popular television personality Ananda Lewis. "Sassy . . . and
unpredictable, she makes our hearts race, whether she's interviewing
celebrities or tackling tough issues affecting teens. She’s the celebrity
sleuth with the heart of gold. [She] not only gets the stars to come
clean, she does it while promoting healthy attitudes." Thanks to her
refreshingly optimistic attitudes toward young people, her arresting good
looks, and her dashing sense of style, Lewis has built a sizeable fan
following. She served as an award-winning host on the Black Entertainment
Television (BET) topical-discussion series Teen Summit, which dealt
exclusively with issues affecting teenagers, including premarital sex,
early pregnancy, and illiteracy among young people. She has also had her
own, short-lived, syndicated talk program, The Ananda Lewis Show, which
premiered in 2001. To viewers between the ages of 18 and 34, Lewis is
perhaps known best as a former video jockey and featured host and
interviewer for MTV. Currently she serves as the Los Angeles–based
celebrity correspondent for the nationally syndicated, nightly half-hour
newsmagazine The Insider.
The younger of two daughters, Ananda Lewis was born on
March 21, 1973 in Los Angeles, California. "Ananda" means "bliss" in
Sanskrit (an ancient Indic language). Her mother worked as an account
manager for Pacific Bell, her father as a computer-animation specialist.
Her sister, Lakshmi, is a physician. Lewis's parents divorced when Ananda
was two years old, and her mother moved with her daughters to San Diego,
California, to be near her own mother. Lewis has credited her mother,
grandmother, and sister for providing her with a positive, supportive
environment. By her own account, as she grew older she felt increasingly
upset by her parents’ divorce. Leaving Ananda and Lakshmi with their
grandmother, the girls' mother took an extended trip to Europe "to escape
the pain of her failed marriage," according to Pamela Johnson in Essence
(October 2001). During her absence, which lasted less than a year, Lewis
felt abandoned. "It was like she nurtured me and carried me in her womb
and then completely left," she told Johnson. Lewis often fought with her
mother while growing up and rarely saw her father, who had remarried. (In
adulthood, Lewis has healed her rifts with both parents.) Her grandmother
told Johnson that she and Lewis also frequently "locked horns."
Lewis struggled with a speech impediment, stuttering
until she was eight years old. ("I haven’t shut up since," she told Cora
Daniels for Savoy [October 2001].) In grade school she earned a reputation
for outspokenness; her comments provoked her teachers' ire or, less often,
their amusement. In 1981 Lewis entered herself in the Little Miss San
Diego Contest, a beauty pageant, and won, despite being one of the
youngest contestants. During the talent portion of the competition, Lewis
performed a dance routine, which she had choreographed herself, to Stevie
Wonder and Paul McCartney’s ballad "Ebony and Ivory." She wore a costume
with one black leg and one white leg, which she had sewed on her own,
according to some sources. After her win, Lewis attracted the attention of
a talent agent and began working in local theater productions and on
television. As a fourth-grader she enrolled at the San Diego School of
Creative and Performance Arts (SCPA), a public magnet school, where she
remained for nine years. (The San Diego SCPA now enrolls only students in
sixth grade or above.)
At the age of 13, Lewis began volunteering as a tutor
and counselor at a Head Start facility. (Created in 1965, Head Start is a
school-readiness program for preschool-age children from low-income
families.) Lewis was inspired by the work and decided to become a teacher
or a psychologist, with the goal of helping young people. Her family,
however, urged her to follow a more lucrative career path--specifically,
law. She majored in history at Howard University, a historically black,
private institution in Washington, D.C., from which she graduated, cum
laude, in 1995. She did not apply to law school.
Throughout college Lewis had volunteered as a mentor
with the group Youth at Risk and at the Youth Leadership Institute. She
was considering attending graduate school to pursue a master’s degree in
education when she learned that auditions were going to be held for the
job of on-screen host of BET's Teen Summit. The children she was working
with that summer "were the main ones kicking me out the door," she
recalled to Johnson. "The kids said, ‘You better go audition for that
show. You don't have a job, and this job is almost over.'"
Lewis auditioned successfully and became the host of
Teen Summit. For three seasons she discussed serious issues affecting
teenagers for a TV audience of several million. The show’s topical,
debate-driven format enabled Lewis to combine skills she had acquired at
the performing-arts school in San Diego with her passion for helping young
people. "She had the guts to openly discuss taboo subjects without
flinching. Executives knew that this kind of gumption was the right stuff
for a live show host," the askmen.com reporter wrote. In 1996, on an
installment of the show entitled "It Takes a Village," Lewis interviewed
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (currently the junior U.S. senator from
New York), whose book with that title had been published earlier in the
year. Also in 1996 Teen Summit was nominated for a CableACE Award, and the
next year the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) presented Lewis with an Image Award for her work on BET.
Soon afterward the cable network MTV offered Lewis a
position as a program host and video jockey. The thought of leaving Teen
Summit was painful for her; indeed, several sources quoted her as
recalling that she "cried for three weeks" while pondering her choices. In
opting to move to MTV, the deciding factor was the possibility of greatly
increasing the size of her viewing audience and, therefore, her potential
for influencing America’s youth.
Asking the type of pointed questions for which she had
become recognized at BET, Lewis brought celebrity interviewing to a new
level on a pair of regularly aired MTV shows: Total Request Live, a daily
Top 10 video-countdown show, and The Hot Zone, which offered both music
videos and Lewis's interviews of musicians and others. On one notable
installment of The Hot Zone, she berated the rapper Q-Tip about the number
of scantily clad dancers in one of his videos. In a reference to Lewis's
broadcasting savvy, Bob Kusbit, MTV’s senior vice president for
production, told Douglas Century for the New York Times (November 21,
1999), "In the past our talent was sometimes just pretty people who could
read cue cards. But when we brought Ananda to MTV, we decided we were
going to do a lot more live television." MTV also called upon Lewis to
host other, topical programs, including two MTV forums on violence in
schools, which aired after the 1999 shootings in a Columbine, Colorado,
high school (in which two students killed 13 people and wounded 21 others
before turning their guns on themselves) and several memorial tributes for
the singer Aaliyah, who perished in a plane crash in 2001. (Lewis and
Aaliyah had been friends.) In 2001 Lewis earned another NAACP Image Award,
for her hosting of the MTV special True Life: I Am Driving While Black.
Lewis made headlines while at MTV when she announced, in
1998, that she intended to remain celibate for at least six months. "I
made the decision for selfish reasons, but I'm going public here because I
realized I might be able to help other girls, too," she told Rosie Amodio
for YM (November 1998), as quoted on the Modern Religion Web site. "I know
the kind of drama that being sexually active brings to your life. I felt
that if it was good for me to take a break, it might be good for other
young girls, too. You see, I think I would be a whole different person if
I hadn't had sex so early. Everybody was saying, ‘Do it!' but nobody ever
said, ‘You don't have to do it.' I think hearing that would have made a
huge difference in my life."
Also during that period Lewis became a familiar presence
at celebrity-attended events in and around New York City, making her
something of a socialite. "If you don’t recognize the name Ananda Lewis,
it may be because you’re older than 23, or not a hip-hop star, or not a
regular supplicant in the land of the velvet ropes," Century wrote at the
height of Lewis’s fame. "In the last year, Ms. Lewis has emerged as the
hip-hop generation’s reigning ‘It Girl,’ meaning she is not just an MTV
personality but a woman whose looks and attitudes have made her
perpetually in demand." In 2000 People magazine included Lewis on its list
of the world's "50 Most Beautiful People."
The Ananda Lewis Show debuted on September 10, 2001,
after much advance press in which Lewis was compared to Oprah Winfrey, the
wildly popular talk-show host long considered to be one of the most
powerful black women in television. (Intermittently for a while after the
series' launch, she hosted special presentations for MTV.) Lewis's series,
which was syndicated by King World Productions, targeted women between the
ages of 18 and 34 by addressing such issues as domestic violence and
breast cancer; it was billed as an alternative to the sensationalism and
provocative offerings of Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake, whose talk shows
were then dominating daytime ratings. The Ananda Lewis Show was cancelled
after one season. "We started on a Monday and then there was the World
Trade Center bombing the next day, and everything has become a mess since
then," Roger King, the chairman and CEO of King World Productions and CBS
Enterprises, the show’s producers, told Michael Freeman for Electronic
Media (October 15, 2001).
In 2004 Lewis became the chief correspondent on
celebrity subjects for the nationally syndicated, nightly entertainment
program The Insider, a spin-off of the popular Entertainment Tonight. For
installments of the program in the spring of 2005, she has interviewed the
heiress and performer Paris Hilton; Don Cheadle and Ryan Phillippe, two of
the stars of Paul Haggis's ensemble film drama Crash; and the veteran
actress Dyan Cannon. Lewis herself has made guest appearances on several
sitcoms.
An avid animal lover, Lewis has served as co-host of the
A&E television-network show America's Top Dog and as a spokesperson for
the Humane Society. (She has frequently introduced her two pet chihuahuas
to interviewers.) She has also been a spokesperson for Reading Is
Fundamental, a nonprofit literacy group. Lewis has at various times has
been romantically linked in the media with several sports and music stars.
She currently resides in Los Angeles and reportedly has six godchildren.
She is said to be a registered member of the Muscogee (Creek Indian)
Nation.
Suggested Reading: Essence p126+ Oct. 2001, with photo;
New York Times IX p1 Nov. 21, 1999, with photos; Savoy p58+ Oct. 2001
Selected Television Shows: Teen Summit, 1994–97; Total
Request Live 1999–2001; The Ananda Lewis Show 2001–02; The Insider, 2004–
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