Ananda Lewis, TV Host And Former MTV VJ, Dead At 52

TV personality Ananda Lewis, best known for her years as an MTV video jockey, has died after a battle with breast cancer. She was 52.

Lewis' sister Lakshmi revealed the news on Facebook Wednesday, writing alongside a photo of her sibling, "She's free, and in His heavenly arms. Lord, rest her soul."

Lewis first shared her breast cancer diagnosis in October 2020, when she revealed in an Instagram video that she had been "fighting to get cancer out of my body for almost two years." At the time, Lewis was battling Stage 3 breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes, and she expressed regret over not getting a mammogram sooner, due to fear of radiation exposure.

Four years later, Lewis said her cancer had metastasized and advanced to Stage 4. In a conversation with CNN's Stephanie Elam and Sara Sidner last year, Lewis said she went against her doctors' advice to get a double mastectomy, instead choosing to treat the disease through alternative homeopathic methods.

"I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way," she said. "Looking back on that, I go, 'You know what? Maybe I should have [gotten the mastectomy].'"

After a three-season stint as host of BET's youth-centric talk show Teen Summit, Lewis broke out in the 1990s as a video jockey (or VJ) for MTV, where she introduced music videos and hosted series (including the interview-focused Hot Zone) until 2001. That same year, she landed her own syndicated talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show, but it was cancelled after just one season.

Lewis' additional TV work included entertainment newsmagazine The Insider (where she served as a correspondent in the mid-2000s), Celebrity Mole: Yucatán (on which she competed in 2004) and TLC/HGTV's revival of home renovation series While You Were Out (which she hosted in 2019).