Ananda Lewis

Ananda Lewis (born March 21, 1973) is an American television host, carpenter, former model, and social activist.

Lewis was born on March 21, 1973, in Los Angeles.

She is of African American and Native American descent, specifically of the Creek and Blackfoot tribes.

Her first name means "bliss" in Sanskrit.

Lewis's mother worked as an account manager for Pacific Bell, and 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.

Her mother took an extended trip to Europe to escape the pain of her failed marriage, leaving Ananda and Lakshmi with their grandmother.

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.

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.

Lewis struggled with a speech impediment, stuttering until she was eight years old.

In grade school she earned a reputation for outspokenness.

In 1981 Lewis entered herself in the Little Miss San Diego Contest, a beauty pageant, and won.

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.

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.

At the age of thirteen, Lewis began volunteering as a tutor and counselor at a Head Start facility.

Lewis was inspired by the work and decided to become a teacher or a psychologist, with the goal of helping young people.

However, Lewis's family urged her to follow a more lucrative career path, specifically law.

She was an MTV veejay from the late 1990s until 2001, when she left the network to host her own broadcast syndicated television talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show.

While a student at Howard University in 1993, Lewis was featured prominently in the hit R&B video by fellow HU alumni Shai, "Baby, I'm Yours", filmed on campus.

She portrayed the love interest of vocalist Carl "Groove" Martin.

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.

She states that the children she was working with that summer were the main ones pushing her to go to the auditions.

Lewis's audition would be a success and she became the host of Teen Summit.

For three seasons she discussed serious issues affecting teenagers for a television audience of several million.

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.

She majored in history at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., from which she graduated cum laude in 1995.

In 1996, on an installment of the show entitled "It Takes a Village", Lewis interviewed then-First Lady Hillary 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).

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 the potential for influencing America's youth.

She was a correspondent for The Insider from 2004 to 2005.

She then became a carpenter.

She hosted the 2019 revival of While You Were Out on TLC.

On October 1, 2020, Lewis announced to her Instagram followers that she has been battling stage 3 breast cancer for the last two years.