Ananda Lewis helped define the MTV VJ at the turn of the millennium
Music is a natural subject for people talking about it to bring their whole self into the mix, and Lewis did just that during her four-year MTV run: Early on in her tenure, she praised Queen of the Blues Dinah Washington en route to introducing the video for Snoop Dogg's 'Gin and Juice.' During a 2001 tribute to the late singer Aaliyah, she took time out from the script to give her own elegy to her friend and peer. She also had journalistic chops that MTV (and, before that, BET) let her flaunt, hosting 'True Life: I Am Driving While Black' and shows that dealt with the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting.
'Ananda is Cleopatra. You know she's a queen,' Prince told the
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'Giving them the space to talk to people who would honor and respect who they were, especially brown people at the time, was really special,' she said in 2020. Three years later, Paramount Global shut down MTV's news division, and Lewis
Lewis, who was born in Los Angeles in 1973 and grew up in San Diego, had her own talk show from 2001 to 2002 and hosted the celebrity news show 'The Insider' before stepping away from the entertainment world and becoming a carpenter in the 2010s. The short-lived 2019 reboot of 'While You Were Out' brought her two career trajectories together, and in recent years she'd popped up on documentaries that covered her era of MTV. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 2010s, and during a 2024 CNN roundtable, she revealed that it had progressed to Stage IV. Lewis died on June 11 at her home in Los Angeles, where she was in hospice care.
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'MTV was like going to an amusement park and having the FastPass to every ride, and you were on the ride with your favorite people every single time,' Lewis told Check the Rhymes TV. During the channel's reign as America's chief arbiter of pop music, Lewis and other standout VJs brought millions of viewers along for each trip with knowledge and enthusiasm.
Maura Johnston is a writer and professor living in Allston. She can be reached at
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