Ananda Lewis, Former MTV Star and Talk Show Host, Passes Away After BRAVE Cancer Battle

Ananda Lewis Dies at 52 Following Stage 4 Breast Cancer Battle

TV personality Ananda Lewis, who rose to fame in the late 1990s as an MTV VJ, has died at age 52. Her sister, Lakshmi Emory, confirmed the news in a Facebook post shared on June 11.

“She’s free, and in His heavenly arms,” Emory wrote, alongside a black-and-white portrait of Lewis and broken heart emojis. “Lord, rest her soul 🙏🏽.”

She is survived by her son, Langston, whom she welcomed in 2011 with Harry Smith, the brother of actor Will Smith.

A Lasting Legacy

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Lewis made her mark as a host on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and “Hot Zone,” eventually becoming one of the most recognizable faces on the network. In 1999, The New York Times called her “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.” She left MTV in 2001 to launch her own daytime talk show, “The Ananda Lewis Show.”

In 2020, Lewis revealed on Instagram that she had been privately battling stage III breast cancer for two years. She explained that her diagnosis came after avoiding routine mammograms due to concerns about radiation exposure. By October 2024, Lewis shared that her cancer had progressed to stage IV.

“My plan at first was to get out excessive toxins in my body. I felt like my body is intelligent, I know that to be true. Our bodies are brilliantly made,” Lewis told CNN in a roundtable conversation with anchor Sara Sidner and her college friend, journalist Stephanie Elam. “I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way. . . . I wish I could go back. It’s important for me to admit where I went wrong with this.”

In January 2025, she wrote in Essence, “We’re not meant to stay here forever. We come to this life, have experiences — and then we go. Being real about that with yourself changes how you choose to live. 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.'”

Rise to Stardom

Born in Los Angeles in 1973, Lewis attended an arts high school before graduating from Howard University in 1995, per People.

Lewis began her on-air career as the host of BET’s “Teen Summit,” where she interviewed then–First Lady Hillary Clinton. After leaving BET, Lewis joined MTV and quickly became a standout presence at the network.

“In the past, our talent was sometimes just pretty people who could read cue cards,” MTV executive Bob Kusbit told The New York Times in the interview. “But when we brought Ananda to MTV, we decided we were going to do a lot more live television, and I was first and foremost interested in her ability to do live TV.”

After “The Ananda Lewis Show” ended in 2002, she appeared on “The Insider,” “Celebrity Mole: Yucatán,” and hosted shows like “America’s Top Dog” and “While You Were Out.”