Former MTV video jockey Ananda Lewis has died at the age of 52. Lewis’s sister Lakshmi Emory announced the news in a Facebook post Wednesday. “She’s free, and in His heavenly arms,” she wrote alongside a black-and-white image of Lewis. “Lord, rest her soul 🙏🏽.”
Lewis rose to prominence around 1997, when she was hired as an MTV VJ, hosting fan-favorite shows including Total Request Live and Hot Zone. During her time at the network, she interviewed everyone from Destiny’s Child and ’N Sync to Brandy and Britney Spears. She later left MTV to host The Ananda Lewis Show, her own talk show, in 2001. The New York Times once called her “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.”
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In 2020, Lewis revealed in a video posted to Instagram that she’d been diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer. At the time, she said she’d forgone regular mammograms due to a fear of radiation. “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.” Four years later, during an interview with CNN’s Stephanie Elam and Sara Sidner, Lewis said she’d also ignored her doctor’s recommendation by opting out of a double mastectomy. Her cancer had since progressed to stage four.
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“We’re not meant to stay here forever. We come to this life, have experiences — and then we go,” Lewis wrote in an essay for Essence last year. “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.’”
Lewis is survived by her son, Langston, who is 14.
