Ananda Lewis

Sarasvati Ananda Lewis (March 21, 1973 – June 11, 2025) was an American broadcast journalist, human rights activist, and two-time NAACP Image Award recipient. Described as "a bright star who was the voice of a generation", Lewis served as a cultural role model and staple television personality for BET and MTV during the late 1990s. She hosted BET's Teen Summit and served as a MTV VJ as well as hosting the network's show Hot Zone as well as occaisonally hosting Total Request Live. She was the subject of the MTV documentary True Life: I Am Driving While Black. Lewis hosted The Ananda Lewis Show, a nationally syndicated American television talk show that ran for two seasons. The show reported on serious subjects in contrast to more sensationalized contemporary talk shows such as the Ricki Lake Show and the Jerry Springer Show. After a break from television, she became a correspondent for The Insider. Lewis returned to television in 2019 to host the revival of While You Were Out on TLC.

In October 2020, Lewis announced that she had been battling stage 3 breast cancer for the previous two years. In an October 2024 interview with Good Morning America, Lewis said she wanted people to remember "that I loved hard, and lived loud and didn’t back away from problems. And loved this life and was OK with letting it go too." Lewis died while in hospice care at her Los Angeles home on June 11, 2025, at the age of 52, seven years after her cancer diagnosis.