Award-winning actress, playwright, and professor Anna Deavere Smith explores performance as a way of knowing in this four-part series, “Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me,” delivered in spring 2024.

Since 1980, Anna Deavere Smith has been interviewing Americans through her project “On the Road: A Search for American Character,” which she developed into a new form of theater. Delivered with segments of performance, these lectures examine this material collected over the course of Smith’s career.

Inaugurated in 1949, the Mellon Lectures is the longest-running lecture series at the National Gallery of Art. The series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.”