Ananda Lewis Dies: Beloved MTV Personality Was 52

Ananda Lewis, the popular TV personality who hosted MTV‘s Total Request Live and Hot Zone, has died at age 52. Lewis’ sister, Lakshmi, confirmed the sad news in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

“She’s free, and in His heavenly arms,” Lakshmi wrote. “Lord, rest her soul.”

In 2020, Ananda Lewis was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer

Although her cause of death hasn’t been confirmed, Lewis was very open about her breast cancer battle in recent years, People reported. In an 2020 Instagram post, Lewis shard that she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She told her followers that she avoided getting regular mammograms because she fears radiation.

“This is tough for me, but if just ONE woman decides to get her mammogram after watching this, what I’m going through will be worth it.🌸PRACTICE EARLY DETECTION🌸Share this with a woman you love. These 6 minutes could help save her life,” Lewis wrote at the time.

During a roundtable discussion in 2024 with CNN’s Stephanie Elam and Sara Sidner, Lewis said she chose not to get a double mastectomy after she was diagnosed and shared that her tumor later metastasized while the cancer progressed to stage 4.

“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,” Lewis told Elam and Sidner, according to People. “Our bodies are brilliantly made. 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.”

Ananda Lewis was known as ‘the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl’

Lewis rose to fame in the ’90s as a host for MTV’s Total Request Live and Hot Zone. Throughout her time on MTV, Lewis interviewed everyone from Britney Spears and NSYNC to Brandy and Destiny’s Child. In 1999, she gained recognition from The New York Times.

“If you don’t recognize the name Ananda Lewis, it may be because you’re older than 23, or not a hip-hop star, or not a regular supplicant in the land of the velvet ropes,” Douglas Century of The New York Times wrote. “In the last year, Ms. Lewis has emerged as the hip-hop generation’s reigning ‘It Girl,’ meaning she is not just an MTV personality but a woman whose looks and attitudes have made her perpetually in demand.”

After leaving MTV in 2001, Lewis hosted her own show, The Ananda Lewis Show, which only lasted for one season.

“I wanted a change,” she told Teen People in 2001. “It was a matter of proving to myself that I can do [this].”

Many years later, she opened about the short-lived show in an interview with Shondaland, saying, “I wish I had stopped the people that wanted me to do the [talk] show and said, ‘Not yet, it’s a little too early to do this.’ It was overkill for me.”

“It wasn’t what I felt like I signed up for,” she added.

In January 2025, Lewis penned a heartfelt essay titled “Prevention Is the Cure” for Essence: “We’re not meant to stay here forever. We come to this life, have experiences — and then we go,” she wrote in part. “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 14-year-old son, Langston, whom she had with Harry Smith (the brother of rapper-turned-actor Will Smith).