The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#51
Barbara Partee
#8574
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Biography Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She is the younger sister of professional baseball player Dick Hall. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled Subject and Object in Modern English.
Go to Profile#52
Anne Applebaum
#1636
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
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Natalia Shvedova
#12559
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Natalia Yulievna Shvedova was a Soviet lexicographer who authored several standard outlines of Russian grammar, for which she was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1982. Yuly Aikhenvald's daughter and Viktor Vinogradov's favourite disciple, Shvedova was elected into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997. After Sergei Ozhegov's death in 1964, Shvedova was responsible for updating and correcting his immensely popular explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Among her later projects was the first semantic dictionary of the language .
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Shana Poplack
#13649
Overall Influence
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded ...
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Twyla Tharp
#3423
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Twyla Tharp is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often uses classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.
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Meryl Streep
#3481
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress. Often described as "the best actress of her generation", Streep is particularly known for her versatility and accent adaptability. She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 32 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight.
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Masha Gessen
#1459
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights. Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist", they have said that for many years they were "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country". They now live in New York with their wife and children.
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Sophie Muller
#3967
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sophie Luise Elisabeth Muller is a British music video director who has directed over 300 music videos. She won a Grammy Award for Annie Lennox's 1992 Diva video album, and an MTV Video Music Award for Lennox's song "Why" from the same album. In 1993, she received a BRIT Award for "Stay" by Shakespears Sister. She won another MTV Award in 1997 for "Don't Speak" by No Doubt. Muller is a longtime collaborator of Sade, Annie Lennox, Gwen Stefani, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Garbage and Shakespears Sister.
Go to Profile#59
Savannah Guthrie
#5701
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Savannah Clark Guthrie is an Australian-born American broadcast journalist and attorney. She is a main co-anchor of the NBC News morning show Today, a position she has held since July 2012. Guthrie joined NBC News in September 2007 as a legal analyst and correspondent, regularly reporting on trials throughout the country. After serving as a White House correspondent between 2008 and 2011 and as co-anchor of the MSNBC program The Daily Rundown in 2010 and 2011, Guthrie was announced as the co-host of Todays third hour alongside Natalie Morales and Al Roker. In that role, she substituted as news anchor and main co-host and appeared as the chief legal analyst across all NBC platforms.
Go to Profile#60
Deirdre Wilson
#5911
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Deirdre Susan Moir Wilson, FBA is a British linguist and cognitive scientist. She is emeritus professor of Linguistics at University College London and research professor at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. Her most influential work has been in linguistic pragmatics—specifically in the development of Relevance Theory with French anthropologist Dan Sperber. This work has been especially influential in the Philosophy of Language. Important influences on Wilson are Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Paul Grice. Linguists and philosophers of language who have been...
Go to Profile#61
April Greiman
#13792
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design t...
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Nancy Dorian
#10045
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Nancy Currier Dorian is an American linguist who has carried out research into the decline of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic-speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She is considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death.
Go to Profile#63
Joan Baez
#4200
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joan Chandos Baez is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums. Fluent in Spanish and English, she has also recorded songs in at least six other languages.
Go to Profile#64
Angelika Kratzer
#6484
Overall Influence
Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled Semantik der Rede. She is an influential and widely cited semanticist whose expertise includes modals, conditionals, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax–semantics interface.
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Ann Curry
#5214
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ann Curry is an American journalist and photojournalist, who has been a reporter for more than 45 years, focused on human suffering in war zones and natural disasters. Curry has reported from the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Darfur, Congo, and the Central African Republic. Curry has covered numerous disasters, including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, where her appeal via Twitter topped Twitter's 'most powerful' list, credited for helping speed the arrival of humanitarian planes.
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Martine Robbeets
#13190
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Martine Irma Robbeets is a Belgian comparative linguist and japanologist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.
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Caryn James
#4130
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Caryn James is an American film critic, journalist, university lecturer, and writer. Biography She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and obtained her doctorate in English literature at Brown University. She began working as a freelance journalist at The New York Times; Newsday; TV Guide; and Vogue. She finally landed a three-week temporary position at The New York Times Book Review and later became a permanent staff member.
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Deirdre English
#4109
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Deirdre English is the former editor of Mother Jones and author of numerous articles for national publications and television documentaries. She has taught at the State University of New York and currently teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a faculty mentor at the Center for the Study of the Working Family at the Graduate School of Sociology. English is co-author, with Barbara Ehrenreich, of For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice along with a number of pamphlets. She contributed essays to Susan Meiselas's photograph...
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Maria Zakharova
#2442
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova is the Director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation since 2015. She has a degree of Candidate in Historical Sciences, the Russian equivalent of a PhD.
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Maria Ressa
#2475
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Maria Angelita Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist. She is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN. She will become Professor of Professional Practice in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University on July 1, 2024, and will be a Distinguished Fellow at Columbia's new Institute of Global Politics beginning in the fall of 2023.
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Soledad O'Brien
#4469
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien is an American broadcast journalist and executive producer. Since 2016, O'Brien has been the host for Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien, a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television. She is chairwoman of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company and distributor that she founded in 2013. She is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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Lois McMaster Bujold
#2573
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is an acclaimed writer, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record . Her novella The Mountains of Mourning won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods.
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Michelle Goldberg
#7163
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Michelle Goldberg is an American journalist and author, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She has been a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a columnist for The Daily Beast and Slate, and a senior writer for The Nation. Her books are Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism ; The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World ; and The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West .
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Aretha Franklin
#2748
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Aretha Louise Franklin was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Referred to as the "Queen of Soul", Rolling Stone twice named her as the greatest singer of all time. With global sales of over 75 million records, Franklin is one of the world's best-selling music artists.
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Jane H. Hill
#8638
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.
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Paula Rego
#5588
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal,
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Deirdre Bair
#8459
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Deirdre Bair was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981. Early life and education Bair was born Deirdre Bartolotta on June 21, 1935 in Pittsburgh. She grew up in nearby Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Her father was a small-business owner, her mother a homemaker. She had one sister and one brother.
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Pina Bausch
#9068
Overall Influence
1940 - 2009 (69 years)
Philippine "Pina" Bausch was a German dancer and choreographer who was a significant contributor to a neo-expressionist dance tradition now known as . Bausch's approach was noted for a stylized blend of dance movement, prominent sound design, and involved stage sets, as well as for engaging the dancers under her to help in the development of a piece, and her work had an influence on modern dance from the 1970s forward. Her work, regarded as a continuation of the European and American expressionist movements, incorporated many expressly dramatic elements and often explored themes connected to trauma, particularly trauma arising out of relationships.
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Phyllida Lloyd
#10131
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Phyllida Christian Lloyd, is an English film and theatre director and producer. Her theatre work includes directing productions at the Royal Court Theatre and Royal National Theatre, and opera director for Opera North and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Her adaptation of three Shakespeare plays received acclaim from critics, with The Guardian calling it "one of the most important theatrical events of the past 20 years".
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Patti Smith
#4575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the R...
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Carol Chomsky
#10380
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Carol Doris Chomsky was an American linguist and education specialist who studied language acquisition in children. Biography Carol Doris Schatz was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1930. She married Noam Chomsky in 1949, the two having known each other since she was five years old and he was seven. Her mother had been a teacher at a Hebrew school where his father was the principal. She was awarded a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951.
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Robin Lakoff
#12283
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.
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Géraldine Muhlmann
#10265
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Géraldine Muhlmann is a French political scientist and political journalist. She is a former host of the France 5 program C politique . Education and positions Muhlmann received the 1er accessit in the philosophy concours général in 1989.
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Andre Norton
#4207
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Andre Alice Norton was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who also wrote works of historical and contemporary fiction. She wrote primarily under the pen name Andre Norton, but also under Andrew North and Allen Weston. She was the first woman to be Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy, to be SFWA Grand Master, and to be inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
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Ellen Lupton
#12709
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service. She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art , where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences.
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Michelle Miller
#16527
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Michelle Miller is a national correspondent for CBS News and currently serves as a co-host on CBS Saturday Morning. She has also served as a substitute anchor on CBS Mornings and 48 Hours on ID. Early life Miller was born in Los Angeles, California. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Howard University and holds a Master of Science degree in urban studies from the University of New Orleans.
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Svetlana Alexievich
#6074
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.
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Michele Norris
#13007
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Michele L. Norris is an American journalist. Since 2019, Norris has worked as an opinion columnist with The Washington Post. She is best known for co-hosting National Public Radio's evening news program All Things Considered from 2002 to 2011. She was the first African-American female host for NPR. Before that Norris was a correspondent for ABC News, as well as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Norris is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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Audrey Hepburn
#9014
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema and was inducted into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List.
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Maria Hinojosa
#18352
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Maria de Lourdes Hinojosa Ojeda is a Mexican-American journalist. She is the anchor and executive producer of Latino USA on National Public Radio, a public radio show devoted to Latino issues. She is also the founder, president and CEO of Futuro Media Group, which produces the show. In 2022, Hinojosa won a Pulitzer Prize.
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Katharina Reiss
#16571
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Katharina Reiss was a German linguist and translation scholar. Her works are important in the field of translation studies. She is widely seen as a co-founder of the Skopos theory. Life Katharina Reiss was born in Rheinhausen, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine, and across the river from Duisburg into which, for administrative purposes, it has subsequently been subsumed. She passed her school finals exam in 1940 and went on to study between 1941 and 1944 at the Institute of Simultaneous Translation of Heidelberg University, where she received her first degree as a "professional translator".
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Agnes de Mille
#6611
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Agnes George de Mille was an American dancer and choreographer. Early years Agnes de Mille was born in New York City into a well-connected family of theater professionals. Her father William C. deMille and her uncle Cecil B. DeMille were both Hollywood directors. Her mother, Anna Angela George, was the daughter of Henry George, the economist. On her father's side, Agnes was the granddaughter of playwrights Henry Churchill de Mille and Matilda Beatrice deMille. Her paternal grandmother was of German-Jewish descent.
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Suzette Haden Elgin
#12340
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Suzette Haden Elgin was an American researcher in experimental linguistics, construction and evolution of languages and poetry and science fiction writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Her best-known non-fiction includes her Verbal Self-Defense series.
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Catherine Callaghan
#25809
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Catherine "Cathy" Callaghan was Professor Emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. Her doctoral dissertation was a grammar of Lake Miwok, written under the supervision of Mary Haas. She then started work on the Lake Miwok Dictionary, which was published in 1965. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Ohio State University in 1965 and remained there until her retirement. She was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancem...
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Arlene Phillips
#9313
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Dame Arlene Phillips is an English choreographer, talent scout, television judge and presenter, theatre director, and former dancer, who has worked in many fields of entertainment. For many years, she was most noted as the choreographer of numerous West End and Broadway musicals, films, and television shows, but she later achieved mainstream fame as a judge on television talent shows including Strictly Come Dancing and So You Think You Can Dance.
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Yevgenia Albats
#3378
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. In 1986—1992, Albats worked as a columnist for Moskovskie Novosti. Since 1995, she has worked with the newspapers Izvestia, Novaya Gazeta and Kommersant. From 2004 to February 2022, she was the host of the author's program "Full Albats" on Echo of Moscow radio station. As of 2022, she works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine.
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Liz Trotta
#20603
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Elizabeth Trotta is an American journalist and conservative commentator. Life and career Trotta was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Her parents, Gaetano "Thomas" Trotta, a successful pharmacist, and Lillian Theresa Mazzacane, were both Catholicss who had emigrated from Italy. Trotta had a sister, Mary L. Juba, who died in 2002.
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Kathleen Hall Jamieson
#10344
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheck.org, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar, in which she argues that Russia very likely helped Donald J. Trump become the U.S. President in 2016.
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Rachel Marsden
#7316
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Rachel Marsden is a Canadian conservative political columnist, television commentator and university lecturer, based in Paris. She is also the CEO of Rachel Marsden Associates, a PR and media consultancy firm. As of March 2016, she hosts Le Désordre mondial, a French-language geopolitical talk show on Sputnik News from the network's Paris studio four times per week. As of 2020, she is also a nationally ranked competitive swimmer at the masters level in France in the 50m, 100m, 200m, 400m freestyle, 50m butterfly, and 200m individual medley and also in Canada.
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Laura Michaelis
#23270
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Background and research She received her BA, MA and PhD in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, writing her thesis under the direction of Charles J. Fillmore.
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