ANNA DEAVERE SMITH TO DELIVER 2007 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
Joan Didion, Nicholas Kristof, Mary Patterson McPherson,
and Muriel Petioni also to Receive Barnard Medals of Distinction
April 2, 2007 – Distinguished actor, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith will address approximately 590 members of the Class of 2007 and their families and friends at Barnard College’s 115th commencement ceremony, to be held on Tuesday, May 15.
Smith, a gifted actor who has appeared on television (The West Wing, The Practice) and in films (Philadelphia, Dave, The American President), is perhaps best known as the author and performer of two one-woman plays about racial tensions in American cities — Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. In these groundbreaking pieces, Smith combined the journalistic technique of interviewing subjects from all walks of life with the art of recreating their words in performance, and transformed herself onstage into an astonishing number of characters (up to 46 in one show), expressing the subjects’ points of view on highly controversial issues. She was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship for creating this “new form of theater.”
In addition to honoring Smith, the College will celebrate the achievements of acclaimed writer Joan Didion; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof; Vice President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former President of Bryn Mawr College Mary Patterson McPherson; and physician and Harlem community activist Muriel Petioni, M.D. All five honorees will be awarded the Barnard Medal of Distinction.
President Judith R. Shapiro will confer the medals, present the degree candidates and address the expected crowd of approximately 3,300 graduates, family members, faculty and staff of Barnard, the most sought after women’s college in the nation.
The ceremony will take place at 2:30 p.m. on Barnard’s historic Lehman Lawn in upper Manhattan.
The media is invited to cover the ceremony.
Journalists should contact Joanne Kwong at 212.854.7580 or jkwong@barnard.edu, in advance.
For more information, please visit www.barnard.edu/commencement/
Biographies of Commencement Honorees
Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, playwright, and teacher. She has been hailed by Newsweek as “the most exciting individual in American theater” for her groundbreaking one-woman plays, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. Her work, which looks at controversial events from multiple points of view, combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through her performance.
In addition to her theater performances, Smith has played National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s The West Wing and co-starred in the CBS drama, Presidio Med. She has appeared in the films The Human Stain, Philadelphia, Dave, The American President and on TV’s The Practice. She is the author of several books, and in 1998, in association with the Ford Foundation, founded the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue at Harvard (now at New York University). The Institute's mission is to explore the role of the arts in relation to vital social issues.
Smith is a tenured professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and is affiliated with the NYU School of Law, where she teaches a course on “The Art of Listening.”
Joan Didion has been one of America's finest novelists and most acute social observers since the 1960s. She is the author of five novels and eight books of nonfiction. With her late husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, she became one-half of one of the most sought-after screenwriting teams in Hollywood.
Her latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published to widespread acclaim and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. Ms. Didion is an active public speaker and has written a stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking, which recently opened on Broadway in March 2007. The play is directed by David Hare and stars Vanessa Redgrave. Her first seven books of nonfiction have been collected in a single volume, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.
Nicholas D. Kristof is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times. He has served The Times in numerous roles since joining in 1984, including as a correspondent in Los Angeles, as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, and as associate managing editor, responsible for the Sunday Times. Since 2001, his Op-Ed columns have appeared every Sunday and Tuesday, often addressing issues vital to women and young girls in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Darfur, Baghdad, and elsewhere around the world.
In 1990, Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Timesjournalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen
Square democracy movement. Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn also
collaborated to pen the books China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of
a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.
Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary.
Mary Patterson McPherson is Vice President of The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, one of the nation's most influential philanthropic
supporters of higher education. Prior to joining the Foundation in
October 1997, Ms. McPherson served as the sixth president of Bryn
Mawr College (1978-1997). A philosopher and outspoken champion of
equal access to education for women, McPherson led Bryn Mawr
through a period of tremendous growth in the number and diversity of its
students-now more than 1,200 undergraduates, more than one-quarter
of whom are women of color. In addition, 500 graduate students, both
men and women, attend Bryn Mawr.
Ms. McPherson currently serves on the board of directors of the Josiah
Macy Jr. Foundation, JSTOR, The Philadelphia Contributionship, and
Goldman Sachs Asset Management. She is on the board of trustees of
Smith College, The American School of Classical Studies at Athens,
Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions, and The Teagle Foundation.
Dr. Muriel Petioni is a physician, educator, and community activist.
She has served the Harlem community for more than five decades,
working diligently to ensure that the underprivileged and underserved,
especially women and children, receive proper medical attention and
equal access to health care. Born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem, Dr.
Petioni followed in the footsteps of her physician father to graduate from
Howard University Medical School. She was the only female in the
College of Medicine's Class of 1937. After a two-year internship at
Harlem Hospital, Dr. Petioni worked as a physician at several colleges around the country before returning to Harlem to establish her own
practice in 1950. She treated patients in the community for the next 40
years, sometimes making house calls, primarily to mothers with small
children and the elderly.
Among her numerous accomplishments are the founding of the Friends
of Harlem Hospital Center in 1987, which has raised millions of dollars
to ensure the Hospital's survival, and the founding of the Susan Smith
McKinney Steward Medical Society for Women in 1974, a professional
association for black women physicians. Dr. Petioni has served as a role
model, mentor, and inspiration to generations of women in medicine.
About Barnard College
The idea was bold for its time. Founded in 1889, Barnard was the only
college in New York City, and one of the few in the nation, where
women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education
available to men. Today, Barnard is the most sought after college for
women and remains dedicated to the education of strong, independentminded
women who change the world and the way we think about it.
###
Media inquiries
Joanne Kwong, 212.854.7580, jkwong@barnard.edu
Download the pdf of this press release. |
