Ananda Lewis, a former MTV host who was one of the network’s most popular stars, has died after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 52.
Her death was announced by her sister, Dr. Lakshmi Emory, in a social media post late Wednesday. The post did not say when or where Lewis died or give a specific cause.
Lewis said last year that her breast cancer, which she first learned she had in 2019, had metastasized and reached a late stage that most doctors would consider incurable.
She rose to television stardom in the 1990s as a V.J., or “video jockey,” on MTV, hosting shows including “Hot Zone,” in which she interviewed stars and gave style advice between introducing music videos.
In 1999, The New York Times described her as “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.” “Hot Zone” had made Lewis one of the network’s two most popular stars, the other being Carson Daly, the network said at the time. She also sometimes hosted the network’s hugely popular show “Total Request Live” as well as its “Spring Break” programs.
Lewis first gained recognition in the 1990s when she was hired to host “Teen Summit,” a long-running weekly live show on BET that was intended to speak to Black teenagers about current issues. In 1996, she interviewed Hillary Clinton, who was the first lady at the time.
“That experience got me noticed at MTV, and in August of 1997, I moved to New York and started working there,” she had told Teen People.
While at MTV, she moderated forums at culturally significant moments, including after the Columbine school shooting and after the R&B star Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001. In 1999, Lewis hosted a special on MTV titled “True Life: I Am Driving While Black,” which earned her an NAACP Image Award.
In 2001, she left MTV to start her own syndicated program, “The Ananda Lewis Show,” which was short-lived, running about 250 episodes from 2001 to 2002. She later expressed regret about the project, saying she hadn’t been quite ready for its demands. She went on to serve for a year as a correspondent on “The Insider,” a popular spinoff of “Entertainment Tonight.”
Over the course of her career, Lewis interviewed numerous celebrities, including Kobe Bryant, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the members of ’N Sync. In interviews, Lewis shifted easily from a lively, ultracool energy to asking thoughtful and probing questions. Sometimes she could be biting; she once took the rapper Q-Tip to task on the air in an MTV interview for having too many scantily clad women in a music video, a confrontation that reverberated through the pop culture world.
In 2023, she took part in the OWN docuseries “Rebuilding Black Wall Street,” which explored the resilience of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, the lively economic center built by Black residents that was destroyed in 1921 in the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Lewis was born on March 21, 1973, in Southern California and grew up in San Diego. Her parents — her mother worked for Pacific Bell and her father was a computer-animation specialist — separated when she was a toddler, and her grandmother helped raise her, according to a 2005 article in Current Biography magazine. As a girl, she studied at the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts.
She later attended Howard University in Washington. While a student there, she starred in the music video for “Baby, I’m Yours” from the R&B quartet Shai, whose members had attended Howard. The video was filmed on campus.
In 2011, Lewis had a son, Langston, with her longtime romantic partner, the businessman Harry Smith. The two later separated. Survivors include her son and her sister Lakshmi, who is a physician in the Chicago area; information on other surviving family members was not immediately available.
In the last years of her life, Lewis was open about her fight against breast cancer and the personal decisions she made regarding her health. She announced her diagnosis in a lengthy video on Instagram in 2020. She said that she had learned the previous year that she had Stage 3 breast cancer. She had refused mammograms in the past because of a fear of radiation exposure, she said, and she implored other women not to make the same decision she had.
Last year, she discussed her declining health in a CNN round- table discussion with the correspondent Stephanie Elam, a close friend of Lewis since their days together at Howard University in the 1990s, and the anchor Sara Sidner, who had had a double mastectomy recently after learning that she had breast cancer.
Lewis said that when she learned that her cancer had worsened in 2023, “it was the first time I ever had a conversation with death because I felt like, this is how it is.”
Lewis said that her cancer had progressed to Stage 4, which is generally considered incurable, and explained she had decided not to get a double mastectomy despite her doctors’ recommendation in early 2019, when she first discovered a lump.
Instead, she had opted for less invasive treatment that included chemotherapy as well as other forms of care, including changes to her diet, sleep and exercise habits, she said.
In a segment on CNN on Thursday, Sidner reshared snippets from their round table and called Lewis a “beautiful friend, mother, sister and daughter.” Elam joined to tell Sidner that she had sat with Lewis the night before she died. “It happened very quickly,” Elam said, adding, “She was at peace with this decision.” If Lewis encouraged anyone to get a mammogram, Elam said, that is her lasting legacy.
In January, Lewis told Essence magazine, that “prevention is the real cure” and reflected on her life. “We’re not meant to stay here forever. We come to this life, have experiences — and then we go,” she said. “I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to suffering unnecessarily. That, for me, is not the quality of life I’m interested in. When it’s time for me to go, I want to be able to look back on my life and say, ‘I did that exactly how I wanted to.’”
Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
The post Ananda Lewis, an MTV Star in the 1990s, Dies at 52 appeared first on New York Times.
