Ananda Lewis

television broadcaster; television show host

Personal Information

Born in 1973 in Los Angeles; daughter of Yvonne, retired account manager for Pacific Bell and Stanley, a computer animation specialist; one older sister Lakshmi, a doctor; parents divorced when Lewis was two; raised in San Diego by mother and grandmother.
Education: graduated cum laude from Howard University in 1995 with a BA in history.

Career

Hosted the television show Teen Summit on BET, 1995-1997; Joined MTV as veejay in 1997, hosts Hot Zone; launches talk show Ananda, Fall 2001.

Life's Work

Almost as soon as she arrived at MTV in 1997, veejay Ananda Lewis began turning heads. In designer gowns at star-studded parties, on the red carpet at the Grammy's, hamming it up on camera with show biz's biggest names. With her waist-length hair, unique sense of style and mile-wide smile, The New York Times quickly dubbed her, "the hip-hop generation's ultimate 'it' girl." But don't judge her by her onscreen persona--what she called "the plasticky TV stuff," in Horizon Magazine. This on-air hipster has been turning minds for a lot longer than she's been turning heads. Lewis has worked with youth programs since she was in high school and still considers it her life's role. On her website she proclaimed, "I came to this planet to impact people's lives, change things, and help people heal by increasing their personal power."

Less Than Bliss

Ananda Lewis was born in Los Angeles in 1973, the second daughter in a working-class family. Her name, Ananda, Sanskrit for bliss, did anything but describe her early life. When she was two, her parents Yvonne and Stanley divorced. Her mother packed up Ananda and her older sister Lakshmi and moved them to San Diego to be closer to their grandmother. She told Essence, "There were always situations when I couldn't see my dad because he was too busy or because his second wife didn't want kids around. So that was an issue for me." With her father gone and her mother working around the clock, Lewis found herself with too little discipline and too much time on her hands. She recalled in Honey Magazine how she almost burnt the kitchen down once.

Fortunately for the fire insurers, in fourth grade she enrolled in the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts (SDSCPA) which redirected her energies into theater, music and photography. "The teachers I had at SDSCPA and the supportive, nurturing environment...are probably the number one reasons I am seeing success now," she said on her website. However, the arts couldn't keep this self-described big-mouth quiet. "I was the one making those little smart-assed comments, but I was very quick-witted, and it would be funny, so [the teacher] would laugh as she scolded," she told Honey Magazine.

Of Tutus and Tutors

During her school years two things happened that would impact the course her life would take. She recalled in Women's Wear Daily (WWD) "the first and last" pageant that she competed in. In a black and white tutu sewn together by her grandmother, she danced to "Ebony and Ivory." She won the pageant and scored an agent while she was at it. Despite landing television and theater spots, she was not ready for the entertainment world.

At thirteen she turned to Head Start and felt she had found her calling. Working with kids as a tutor and counselor led to a dream of studying psychology in college. However, when she arrived at Howard University she majored in history. "My parents were adamant about me going to law school and I was adamant about not going, so I chose history as a compromise," she told Stress Magazine. "But my youth work is where I definitely felt I was heading."

Throughout college, she continued working with kids through programs like Youth at Risk, a life-restructuring program for teenagers. She also spent two summers as a trainer with the Youth Leadership and Development Institute. "I had 20 young folk everyday for three months per summer. It was so intense to witness the impact of my work."

From Head Start to the Hot Zone

When graduation rolled around in 1995, she found herself unsure what to do. Her parents were pressuring her to apply to law school and she was considering joining Teach for America or continuing on to graduate school, when she was sidelined by a chance to audition for Black Entertainment Television (BET) as a host for Teen Summit. Unable to make up her mind, her youth group made it for her. "My youngins' were like 'If you don't [audition], everything you taught us about reaching for our highest potential is basically bullshit," she recalled on her website. Within months, she was hosting the show.

Teen Summit turned out to be the perfect fit. It allowed her to continue working on youth issues but with a much broader impact. The show dealt with problems from homeless teens to teen pregnancy. In three seasons as host, Lewis made quite an impression, not only her audience, but also on media professionals. The show was nominated for a 1996 Cable Ace Award and in 1997, was awarded an NAACP Image Award for the "It Takes a Village" episode, in large part due to Lewis' interview with Hillary Rodham-Clinton. Soon after, MTV came calling.

Lewis was at first hesitant to leave a show that she felt made a difference in the lives of teens. On her website's bio she said, "I knew that I would not readily have access to doing a show like this again for a very long time and I had a real problem with that." However, she realized that at MTV she could a reach broader audience, and hopefully get to a place where she could have more influence and make more of an impact on the youth issues she cares so much for.

Soon after arriving at MTV, she was assigned her own show, "Hot Zone," and her celebrity shot up. She didn't waste time using it to promote a youth issue that she feels strongly about--teen abstinence. Her first sexual experience was the result of date rape. However, though she was just fifteen, she feels that if she had had more self-esteem, she could have said no. She feels that empowering girls to say no will help prevent another young girl from getting in that situation. For Lewis, this sometimes means well-publicized bouts of abstinence. By being so open with both her past experience and her current practices, she is already reaching out to young women through her role as an MTV star.

More Than Just a Pretty Mind

There is more to Lewis than just her youth activism. "I saw MTV not only as access to the masses, but also an opportunity to be more of the woman I am and cultivate my ability to have fun," she said on her website. One role she hadn't bargained for was that of style guru. Since hitting MTV, her unique style has gotten her noticed not only in your standard celeb rags, but in fashion heavy hitters like WWD and Vogue. Of her funky look she told WWD, "I've never been able to go into a store and pull something off the rack and say 'It's perfect' I've always wanted to tweak it a little." Despite her success, she still shops in Target and buys sunglasses at drugstores, though she does love to glam it up in designer duds for big events. However, conscious of her influence on young women, she advised teens in WWD, "Go to a thrift store and buy what you like.... You shouldn't be saving up allowance to buy one pair of jeans when you could buy half a store full of thrift store stuff and funk it out yourself."

Lewis is also contending with the public's fascination with her looks. Her beauty has landed her on the cover of many magazines and she was voted one of the world's 50 most beautiful people by People Magazine. Lewis takes all this focus on her appearance with a grain of salt, shrugging it off as genetics. Dismissing responsibility for her good looks in Honey Magazine she said, "[What I'm responsible for] is what my heart does, what my mind does and what my mouth does."

Lewis will be able to take that responsibility much further when King World Productions launches her much anticipated talk show, "Ananda," in the Fall of 2001. Envisioned as an intelligent and entertaining show that tackles controversial topics to get people talking, the show is already eliciting comparisons to Oprah. That's fine with Lewis. "It's a huge compliment just to be put into the same sentence with her," she told Broadcasting and Cable. Though she will continue to host beach parties on MTV, she hopes that "Ananda" will be a move back towards the more serious issues that she dealt with in Teen Summit.

Woman of a Thousand Faces

Lewis is a bright light in the din of stylish stars that are all fluff and no stuff. She is that enviable mix of beauty and brains. A self-described boot addict and a youth activist, she is strongly committed to conquering the problems that youth face today, with a few shopping tips thrown in. As fluent in hip-hop culture as she is in issues of teen sexuality, she is a voice for teens that knows how to speak their language. Fashion icon, MTV house party girl, spokesperson for Reading is Fundamental--this diversity is what makes Lewis so influential and so real. On a live chat on People.com, she said, "My advice to anyone is to be exactly who you are...you bring something unique that no one else really has." She lives what she preaches and hopefully as she continues to be her own inimitable, positively 100% Ananda-self, she'll inspire kids struggling to find themselves in this mad MTV-fueled world we live in.

Awards

Nominated for a Cable Ace Award in 1996; NAACP Image Award, 1997.

Further Reading

• Broadcasting and Cable, January 8, 2001, p. 37.
• Essence, June 2000, p. 100.
• Honey Magazine, October 1999.
• Horizon, January 1999.
• People Weekly, May 8, 2000, p. 120.
• Stress Magazine, February/March 1998.
• WWD, August 10, 2000, p. 6B.

• Additional information was obtained at: www.anandalewis.com; www.anandalive.com; www.people.com; and www.react.com.

— Candace LaBalle

Ananda Lewis
Born	March 21, 1973 (1973-03-21) (age 36) Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Model, television personality

Ananda Lewis (born March 21, 1973) is an American television personality, social activist, and model. She appeared on Maxim and AskMen.com's Hottest Celebrity Lists in 2001.^[1] She was an MTV veejay from the late 1990s until 2001, when she left the network to host her own talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Personal life 2 Career 2.1 Early career 2.2 Later career 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Early life

Lewis was born on March 21, 1973, in Los Angeles, California.^[2][3] She is of African American and Native American descent, specifically of the Creek and Blackfoot tribes.^[3] Her name means "bliss" in Sanskrit.^[3] Lewis's mother worked as an account manager for Pacific Bell, and her father as a computer-animation specialist.^[3] 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.^[3] Her mother took an extended trip to Europe to escape the pain of her failed marriage, leaving Ananda and Lakshmi with their grandmother.^[3] During her absence, which lasted less than a year, Lewis felt abandoned. She states:

"It was like she nurtured me and carried me in her womb and then completely left."^[3]

Lewis often fought with her mother while growing up and rarely saw her father, who had remarried. Lewis and her grandmother also frequently "locked horns" while she was growing up.^[3]

Lewis struggled with a speech impediment, stuttering until she was eight years old.^[3] 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.^[3] 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." After her win, Lewis attracted the attention of a talent agent and began working in local theater productions and on television.^[3] In fourth grade she enrolled at the San Diego School of Creative and Performance Arts (SCPA), a public magnet school, where she remained for nine years.^[3] At the age of thirteen, Lewis began volunteering as a tutor and counselor at a Head Start facility.^[3] Lewis was inspired by the work and decided to become a teacher or a psychologist, with the goal of helping young people.^[3] However, Lewis's family urged her to follow a more lucrative career path specifically law.^[3] She majored in history at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., from which she graduated, cum laude, in 1995.^[3][4]

Personal life

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. In adulthood, Lewis has healed her rifts with both parents.^[3] Lewis was a good friend friend of former singer Aaliyah before her accidental death.^[3] She has six godchildren.^[3]

Career

Early career

Throughout college Lewis had volunteered as a mentor with the group Youth at Risk and at the Youth Leadership Institute.^[3] 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.^[3] She states that the children she was working with that summer were the main ones pushing her to go to the auditions.^[3] She states:

"The kids said, ‘You better go audition for that show. You don't have a job, and this job is almost over.'"^[3]

Lewis's audition would be a success and she became the host of Teen Summit.^[3] For three seasons she discussed serious issues affecting teenagers for a television audience of several million.^[3] The show’s topical, debate-driven format enabled Lewis to follow her passion for helping young people, and use her skills she had acquired at the performing-arts school in San Diego.^[3] Lewis is known for having the courage to openly discuss taboo subjects without flinching.^[3] Her executives knew that this kind of gumption was the right stuff for a live show host," In 1996, on an installment of the show entitled "It Takes a Village," Lewis interviewed then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, 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 Black Entertainment Television (BET).^[3] 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.^[3] 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.

Lewis's style as recognized at BET is responsible for bringing 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.^[3] 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.^[3] 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 on 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."^[3] MTV also called upon Lewis to host other, topical programs, including two MTV forums on violence in schools, which aired after the Columbine High School massacre and several memorial tributes for the singer Aaliyah, who perished in a plane crash in 2001.^[3] In 2001 Lewis earned another NAACP Image Award, for her hosting of the MTV special True Life: I Am Driving While Black.

In 1998, Lewis made headlines while at MTV when she announced, that she intended to remain celibate for at least six months.^[3] She states:

"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. 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."^[3]

Also during that period Lewis became a familiar presence at celebrity-attended events in and around New York City. "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."^[3]

Later career

In 2000 People included Lewis on its list of the world's "50 Most Beautiful People."^[3] In 2001, Lewis decided to leave MTV in order to start her own talk show.^[3] 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 women of African American descent in television.^[3] Lewis continued to do special presentations for MTV after her show had begun.^[3] Lewis's series, which was syndicated by King World Productions, targeted women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four 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.^[3] Lewis's show aired on some WB and NBC stations before the Ananda Lewis Show was canceled after one season.^[3][5] Her show premiered the day before the September 11 attacks, and it aired for only one year.^[6] Lewis then worked briefly for BET. Her show's producers stated: "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.^[3]

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.^[3] 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 Crash), and actress Dyan Cannon.^[3] Lewis herself has made guest appearances on several sitcoms.^[3]

In 2004 Ms. Lewis also appeared on the ABC network's reality show called Celebrity Mole: Yucatan. This reality series won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement for Enhanced Television.^[7]

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.^[3] She has been known to frequently introduce her two pet chihuahuas to interviewers.^[3] 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.

References

1. ^ http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3F_adv_prop%3Dimage%26fr%3Dslv2-msgr%26va%3Dananda%2Blewis%26sz%3D&w=132&h=198&imgurl=www.dailyceleb.com%2Fthumbs%2Ftn.DC.245769.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailyceleb.com%2Fproduction%3Fview%3Devent%26amp%3Beid%3D3028&size=12.8kB&name=tn.DC.245769.jpg&p=ananda+lewis&type=JPG&oid=fb410d9c7773616e&no=5&tt=199&sigr=11skggfk0&sigi=11at2rfjs&sigb=12t6ee66a
2. ^ MSN (2008). "Ananda Lewis:Overview". MSN. http://movies.msn.com/celebrities/celebrity/ananda-lewis/. Retrieved on 2008-11-04. 
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av} H.W. Wilson (2008). "Cover Biography for June 2005 Ananda Lewis, Television personality". The HW Wilson Company. http://www.hwwilson.com/currentbio/cover_bios/cover_bio_6_05.htm. Retrieved on 2008-11-04. 
4. ^ People Magazine May 08, 2000 Vol. 53 No. 18 (2008). "Ananda Lewis: Veejay". People Magazine. http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20131155,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-04. 
5. ^ Lynette Rice (2008). [http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,99817,00.html "On the Air Talk Jockey"]. Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,99817,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-04. 
6. ^ http://www.tv.com/the-ananda-lewis-show/show/11504/summary.html
7. ^ http://www.realitytvworld.com/celebritymoleyucatan/

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ananda Lewis

• Ananda Lewis at AskMen.com
• Ananda Lewis at the Internet Movie Database

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)