Former MTV host Ananda Lewis dies at 52
The former MTV veejay revealed her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2020 and said last year it had progressed to Stage 4.
Ananda Lewis, whose prominence as an MTV host made her a television star of the 1990s, died after years of living with breast cancer, her family said in a social media post Wednesday. She was 52.
Her sister, Lakshmi, confirmed her death in a Facebook post: “She’s free, and in His heavenly arms,” she wrote. “Lord, rest her soul.” Representatives for Lewis did not immediately respond to comment.
Lewis found stardom as a television host on BET’s “Teen Summit,” where she interviewed then-first lady Hillary Clinton in a segment that earned an NAACP Image Award. In 1999, the New York Times called her “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl” because of her rising popularity. Lewis worked as an MTV veejay for years and eventually began “The Ananda Lewis Show” in 2001.
Lewis publicly shared her diagnosis in October 2020, when her cancer was Stage 3. She told CNN in an October 2024 interview that she had been living with breast cancer for nearly six years and that it had progressed to Stage 4. She told CNN that her doctors had recommended a double mastectomy, but she opted for alternative care methods.
“I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way,” Lewis said, adding, “Looking back on that, I go, ‘You know what, maybe I should have’” pursued the mastectomy.
Lewis said in the CNN interview that breast cancer – the second-leading cause of cancer death in women, according to the American Cancer Society – significantly changed her life. In an interview with The Washington Post in October 2024, Lewis said she faced backlash for declining the advice of her doctors, calling the double mastectomy a “radical, harsh and life-altering” surgery.
“To have to be attacked on top of it, it’s like, no wonder people stay quiet, but I think it’s even more important to share stories because other people can benefit from them,” Lewis told The Post. “And you know, I’m tough. I can take it.”
In January, Lewis wrote in an essay for Essence that women need to pay attention to their bodies to avoid cancer or to catch it early. “We’re not meant to stay here forever,” she wrote in the essay. “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.”
Praveena Somasundaram contributed to this report.
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