Ananda Lewis, the beautiful, vibrant, and intelligent outspoken on-air personality on BET and MTV, who guided us through some of the most popular music artists of the 90’s, has passed away. She was 52 years old.
Lewis’ sister, Lakshmi, shared the news of her death on Facebook, writing, “She’s free, and in His heavenly arms. Lord, rest her soul.” Lakshmi also told TMZ that Lewis died Wednesday morning at her home in Los Angeles after battling cancer for six years.
Lakshmi tells TMZ that Ananda’s 14-year-old son graduated middle school today “…a terribly bittersweet day.”
Just a few months ago, we aired an exclusive BDO interview where Lewis clarified she was elevated to stage IV in October 2024 and was very ill at that time. But, after much trial and error and a combination of conventional and integrative treatment methods, she was doing “fantastic.”
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She also shared how her family, friends and the sheer beauty of life fuels her into a place of “gratitude” and love. The rousing interview was infused with a host of “Amens” and shouts of praise for the timely and genuine advice she shared. Watch the video in its entirety by clicking the image below.
How Lewis Became an Inspiration
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.
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It’s hard to see it all of Lewis’ on-air hosting jobs, but she struggled with a speech impediment early on, 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 majored in history at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., from which she graduated cum laude in 1995.
While a student at Howard University in 1993 (her alma mater she continued to rep and showcase on may of her live social media segments) 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.
“The kids in my program were like, ‘you have to go for that audition because you always tell us that life brings you great opportunities and it’s your job to step up. Now you’re not going to step up?’” Lewis told BET in 2022. “They were calling me a hypocrite. I’m grateful that I went and listened.”
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. 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.
Lewis hosted and VJed a variety of shows throughout the ’90s and 2000s, including MTV Live, Total Request Live, a daily top ten video-countdown show, and Hot Zone, which offered both music videos and Lewis’s interviews of musicians and others.
Lewis maintained her passion for advocacy throughout her career. While at MTV, she moderated forums on school violence after the Columbine school shooting and hosted MTV’s news special “True Life: I Am Driving While Black” in 1999.
Since then, Lewis served as a correspondent on CBS’s “The Insider” and made guest appearances on various TV shows including “Celebrity Mole: Yucatán” and “America’s Top Dog.”
After Her Diagnosis, She Left a Message for the World
“The cancer diagnosis caused me to change things in my life I never would have changed otherwise, that I needed to change but would not change,” she said. “And those changes have allowed me access to more of my joy, more of the time.”
“I need you to share this with the women in your life who may be as stubborn as I was about mammograms and I need you to tell them that they have to do it,” Lewis said in her announcement. “Early detection, especially for breast cancer, changes your outcome. It can save their life.”
Rest In Peace, Ananda. You are missed.
