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,
#1451
Rosemary Clooney
#95811
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Rosemary Clooney was an American singer and actress. She came to prominence in the early 1950s with the song "Come On-a My House", which was followed by other pop numbers such as "Botch-a-Me", "Mambo Italiano", "Tenderly", "Half as Much", "Hey There", "This Ole House", and "Sway". She also had success as a jazz vocalist. Clooney's career languished in the 1960s, partly because of problems related to depression and drug addiction, but revived in 1977, when her White Christmas co-star Bing Crosby asked her to appear with him at a show marking his 50th anniversary in show business. She continued...
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Judy Delin
#130081
Overall Influence
Judy Delin is a language expert with an academic background in linguistics who is currently Partner at Doctrine Ltd, a London-based language and information design company. She held previous roles at The Brand Union and The Information Design Unit. Prior to this, she was Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Leeds and the University of Reading and published the book The Language of Everyday Life in 2000. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Science from The University of Edinburgh in 1990 and a BA in English Studies from The University of Nottingham in 1984.
Go to Profile#1453
Amanda Mealing
#82105
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Amanda Jane Mealing is an English actress, director and producer, known for portraying the role of Connie Beauchamp in the BBC medical dramas Holby City and Casualty.==Early life== The only adopted member of her family, Mealing was the youngest of four children, with two sisters and an elder brother. She grew up in Dulwich, South London, with her adoption being a secret. Although very much part of a strong and loving family, she was always aware that she looked nothing like her siblings and was left feeling that she did not quite fit in. Despite a yearning to know more about her biological parents, Mealing was concerned that looking for them would upset her family.
Go to Profile#1454
Tweet
#69574
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Charlene Keys , better known by the stage name Tweet, is an American singer-songwriter. Career Early career In the early nineties, Tweet joined the female trio Sugah, leaving her daughter with her parents in Panama City, Florida. Sugah was composed of Tweet, Susan Weems, and Rolita White, and was a part of Devante Swing's Swing Mob collective. While there, she met Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, with whom she formed a close friendship. Around 1999, Tweet returned to her parents' home in Panama City.
Go to Profile#1455
Katy Milkman
#10464
Overall Influence
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
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Nancy Condee
#101629
Overall Influence
Nancy Condee is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and served as the head of the Cultural Studies department from 1995 to 2006. Her field is contemporary Russian cinema and cultural politics.
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Sandrine Bony
#97233
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Sandrine Bony-Léna, née Bony, is a French-born climatologist who is currently Director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Sorbonne University, Paris. Bony was notably a lead author of the Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Go to Profile#1458
Petra Müllejans
#114475
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Petra Müllejans is a German violinist, conductor and pedagogue, known especially for her work in historical performance practice and as a co-founder and performer with the Freiburger Barockorchester.
Go to Profile#1459
Cristina Pumplun
#28092
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Cristina M. Pumplun is the missionary vicar of Westerkerk in Amsterdam. Until 2003 she was Secretary of Studies at the Thomas Institute of Tilburg University in Utrecht. Pumplun studied German language and literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and then at Universität Passau, Germany. Her Ph.D. thesis investigated German devotional texts of the 17th century, specifically the work of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, and was published as Begriff des Unbegreiflichen: Funktion und Bedeutung der Metaphorik in den Geburtsbetrachtungen der Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg . She taught moder...
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Cynthia White
#141578
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Cynthia Joan White is a New Zealand applied linguistics academic. Academic career After an undergraduate at Victoria University of Wellington, White earned her PhD entitled 'Metacognitive, cognitive, social and affective strategy use in foreign language learning: a comparative study' from Massey University, while working there. She is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of New England in Australia.
Go to Profile#1461
Galit Shmueli
#82221
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Galit Shmueli is a data scientist who works in Taiwan as Tsing Hua Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Service Science, National Tsing Hua University. She is the author of many textbooks in business statistics and is known for her work on information quality, and on clarifying the difference between explanations and predictions in statistical analyses.
Go to Profile#1462
Vicki Karaminas
#56270
Overall Influence
Vicki Karaminas is a New Zealand fashion academic, and a full professor at Massey University. Academic career After a 2002 PhD titled 'Interrupted journeys : travelling light : [soma]tographies of space' at the University of Technology, Sydney, Karaminas moved to Massey University, rising to full professor.
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Juliet McMains
#114240
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Juliet E. McMains is a United States dance scholar and instructor, the author of the Glamour Addiction, the first comprehensive study of the United States DanceSport. Juliet McMains started doing ballroom dancing as a teenager. Eventually she became professional ballroom dancer until she stopped competing in 2003. Her Senior thesis in the college was Tradition and Transgression: Gender Roles in Ballroom Dancing. She earned B.A. in Women's Studies from Harvard University and PhD in dance history and theory at the University of California, Riverside.
Go to Profile#1464
Astrid Gynnild
#125558
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Astrid Gynnild is professor of media studies at the Department of Information and Media Studies at the University of Bergen Norway. Gynnild is principal investigator of the trans-disciplinary research project ViSmedia 2015–19. Gynnild also heads the journalism program at the University of Bergen, which in 2017 will be integrated into Media City Bergen. Her research interests lie at the intersection of digital journalism, innovation and new technologies. She is also engaged in developing new forms of learning in profession oriented disciplines in higher education. Her scientific articles are ...
Go to Profile#1465
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
#115892
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
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Alice Sheppard
#92776
Overall Influence
Alice Sheppard is a disabled choreographer and dancer from Britain. Sheppard started her career first as a professor, teaching English and Comparative Literature. After attending a conference on disability studies, she saw Homer Avila performed and was inspired. She became a member of the AXIS Dance Company and toured with them. She also founded her own dance company, Kinetic Light, which is an artistic coalition created in collaboration with other disabled dancers Laurel Lawson, Jerron Herman and Michael Maag, who also does lighting and is a video artist. A lot of Alice's work revolves inters...
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Emily Nussbaum
#86820
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Emily Nussbaum is an American television critic. She served as the television critic for The New Yorker from 2011 until 2019. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Early life Nussbaum was born in the United States to mother Toby Nussbaum and Bernard Nussbaum, who served as White House Counsel to President Bill Clinton.
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Ellen Broselow
#149615
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Ellen Broselow is an experimental linguist specializing in second language acquisition and phonology. Since 1983, she has been on the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook University, where she has held the position of Professor of Linguistics since 1993.
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Ibtihal Al-Khatib
#112111
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Ibtihal Al-Khatib is a Kuwaiti academic, journalist, and prominent advocate of secular liberal values in Middle Eastern societies. She is a professor at the Kuwait University in the department of English Language and Literature. She has been the subject of controversy because of her outspoken defense of secularism, separation of church and state, and civil rights, including gay rights.
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Lynn Hershman Leeson
#83191
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a multimedia American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson is a pioneer in new media, and her work with technology and in media-based practices helped legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking. She has been referred to as a "new media pioneer" for the prescient incorporation of new science and technologies in her work. She is based in San Francis...
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Judith Tonhauser
#119443
Overall Influence
Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart. Education and career Tonhauser received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2006. Her dissertation was titled The Temporal Semantics of Noun Phrases: Evidence from Guaraní. From 2006 to 2020, she was on the faculty of the Linguistics department at The Ohio State University. Since 2020 she has been Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.
Go to Profile#1472
Arline Fisch
#111840
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Arline Fisch is an American artist and educator. She is known for her work as a metalsmith and jeweler, pioneering the use of textile processes from crochet, knitting, plaiting, and weaving in her work in metal. She developed groundbreaking techniques for incorporating metal wire and other materials into her jewelry.
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Cynthia Clopper
#112715
Overall Influence
Cynthia Clopper is an American linguist and professor and chair of the linguistics department at Ohio State University. Clopper is known for her work on dialect perception. She currently serves as co-editor of the journal Language and Speech and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Phonetics. Clopper is currently the president of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
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Karin Gundersen
#100654
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Karin Gundersen is a Norwegian literary scholar and translator. A professor of French literature at the University of Oslo, she is also a translator of French literary works. She was awarded the Bastian Prize in 1993, for her translation of Stendhal's novel The Charterhouse of Parma into Norwegian. She received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 2006, for translation of Stendhal's autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard into Norwegian langue. She was awarded the Dobloug Prize in 2006.
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Lynne Bowen
#72931
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Lynne Bowen is a Canadian non-fiction writer, historian, professor, and journalist, best known for her popular historical books about Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Over the years, Bowen has won awards such as the Eaton's British Columbia Book Award , the Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Writing British Columbia History , and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize .
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Sam Phillips
#102432
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Leslie Ann Phillips , better known by her stage name Sam Phillips, is an American singer and songwriter. Her albums include the critically acclaimed Martinis & Bikinis in 1994 and Fan Dance in 2001. She has also composed scores for the television shows Gilmore Girls, Bunheads, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
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Olga Frolova
#107295
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Olga Pavlovna Frolova / Russian: Óльга Пáвловна Фролóва is a Russian orientalist who wrote her major works on the Japanese and Chinese linguistics. She is a professor and a public figure. She received such State Rewards as the Order of the Rising Sun in 2007, The Order of Merit for the Fatherland in 2010, etc. At present she is the head of the Oriental Branch at the Foreign Languages Department of Novosibirsk State University .
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Camilla Williams
#106625
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Camilla Ella Williams was an American operatic soprano who performed nationally and internationally. After studying with renowned teachers in New York City, she was the first African American to receive a regular contract with a major American opera company, the New York City Opera. She had earlier won honors in vocal competitions and the Marian Anderson Fellowship in 1943–44.
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Annick De Houwer
#134528
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Annick De Houwer is a Belgian linguist, academic, researcher and author. She is the Initiator and Director of the Harmonious Bilingualism Network . De Houwer's research has focused on early child bilingualism and the role of input in bilingual acquisition and on bilingual families' well-being. She has authored the books Bilingual Development in Childhood; Bilingual First Language Acquisition; An Introduction to Bilingual Development; and The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: a Case Study. She was co-series editor of Trends in Language Acquisition Research and series editor of IMPACT: Studies of Language in Society.
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Constance DeJong
#156358
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Constance DeJong is an American visual artist who works in the margin between sculpture and painting/drawing. Her predominate medium is metal with light as a dominant factor. She is currently working in New Mexico and is a professor of sculpture at the University of New Mexico. DeJong received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Art Fellowship in 1982. In 2003, she had a retrospective at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. That same year, Constance DeJong: Metal was published and released by University of New Mexico Press. Her work has been described by American art critic Dave Hi...
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Martha Crago
#66623
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Martha Crago is the Vice-Principal of Research and Innovation at McGill University. She is an internationally known expert on language acquisition, specializing in studying language acquisition across languages and learner groups. Crago received a B.A. in sociology and anthropology from McGill University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in communication sciences and disorders from McGill in 1988. She was employed at McGill from 1971 to 2005 and the University of Montreal from 2005 to 2007. She was the Vice-president of Research at Dalhousie University from 2007 until accepting her current position. She ...
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Stephanie Waring
#119291
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Stephanie Louise Waring is an English actress, known for portraying the role of Cindy Cunningham in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks. In addition to her work on Hollyoaks, she has also had roles on Coronation Street, Doctors, Holby City, Crash Palace and Merseybeat, as well as competing in the tenth series of Dancing on Ice.
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Eliso Virsaladze
#126052
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Eliso Virsaladze is a Georgian pianist. Biography She was born in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR. Her father Constantine Virsaladze was a prominent doctor and scientist, so was her grandfather Spiridon Virsaladze. She received her first piano lessons at the age of 9 from her grandmother, Anastasia Virsaladze, a well-known pianist and professor in Georgia. From the age of 9, she also started receiving lessons from Heinrich Neuhaus up until his last days. She graduated from the Tbilisi State Conservatory , and continued her education as a postgraduate student at the Moscow Conservatory with Yakov Zak. She has also played for A.
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Laila Storch
#133741
Overall Influence
1921 - 2022 (101 years)
Laila Storch was an American oboist. Biography She was the first woman oboist to graduate from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she studied with Marcel Tabuteau. Career Storch was the principal oboist for the Houston Symphony Orchestra, Carmel Bach Festival, the Bethlehem Bach Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, and the Casals Festivals. Additionally, she played with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Philharmonic, and the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. She was professor of oboe at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, for many years at the University of Washingto...
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Joan Braderman
#51654
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.
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Jasone Cenoz
#163387
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
#1487
Tatiana Nikolayeva
#108205
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Tatiana Petrovna Nikolayeva was a pianist, composer, and teacher from the Soviet Union. Life Nikolayeva was born in Bezhitsa, in the Bryansk district, on May 4, 1924. Her mother was a professional pianist and studied at the Moscow Conservatory under the renowned pedagogue Alexander Goldenweiser, and her father was an amateur violinist and cellist. Nikolayeva won first prize in the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig, which was founded to mark the bicentenary of Bach's death in 1750. Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a member of the jury, composed and dedicated the 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op.
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Marijn van Dijk
#45899
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Marijn van Dijk is a Dutch linguist. She is currently an associate professor of developmental psychology at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of the University of Groningen, Netherlands.
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Susan Hanson
#130267
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Susan Hanson is an English actress who played the part of Diane Lawton in the long-running British soap opera Crossroads from 1965–87, when her character was controversially killed off. She also had a brief role in the film Catch Us If You Can starring The Dave Clark Five.
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Florence Graves
#111685
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Florence George Graves is an American journalist and the founding director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She is an investigative reporter and editor whose work focuses on exposing abuses of government and corporate power, and on revealing inequities between the powerful and the powerless. She also is a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, she and a colleague broke the Senator Bob Packwood sexual misconduct story, which led to an historic three-year Senate investigation followed by a Senate Ethics Committee vote to expel him and then his forced resignation.
Go to Profile#1491
Fairuz
#103486
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Nouhad Wadie Haddad , known as Fairuz , is a Lebanese singer. She is considered by many as one of the leading vocalists and most famous singers in the history of the Arab world. Fairuz is considered the musical icon of Lebanon and is popularly known as "the soul of Lebanon".
Go to Profile#1492
Carmen Silva-Corvalan
#140756
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Carmen Silva-Corvalán is a Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Southern California, where she taught since she obtained her doctoral degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1979. Silva-Corvalán has published extensively on bilingualism and language contact, and on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic constraints which condition syntactic variation. Silva-Corvalan was one of the four chief editors of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Cambridge University Press.
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Lo Man-fei
#73510
Overall Influence
1955 - 2006 (51 years)
Lo Man-fei was a Taiwanese dancer and choreographer. She was a member of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, founded by Lin Hwai-min, between 1979 and 1994. Lin subsequently founded her own dance troupe, Taipei Crossover Dance Company, and led Cloud Gate 2 from 1999 to her death.
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Jeanette Gundel
#139160
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Jeanette Gundel was an American linguist noted for her work on information structure and pragmatics. Academic career Gundel received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1974. Her dissertation, "The Role of Topic and Comment in Linguistic Theory", was published in 1977 by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, and in 1988, in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Series by Garland.
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Kate Ford
#95689
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Kate Ford is an English actress. She is known for her portrayal of Tracy Barlow in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street . Ford was born in Salford, Greater Manchester. She attended Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria and Blackpool and The Fylde College, Lancashire. She later trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
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Suzette Forgues Halasz
#147925
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Suzette Forgues Halasz was a Canadian cellist and music educator. She held the post of principal cellist of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra from 1942 to 1946 and worked in the same capacity at the New York City Opera for many years. She was married to conductor Laszlo Halasz for over 50 years.
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Devyani Sharma
#136933
Overall Influence
Devyani Sharma is a sociolinguistics professor and chair of the Linguistics department at Queen Mary University of London. Education Sharma holds a PhD and MA in linguistics from Stanford University and a BA in anthropology/ linguistics and fine art from Dartmouth College.
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Quiara Alegría Hudes
#64120
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, producer, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights , and screenplay for its film adaptation. Hudes' first play in her Elliot Trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, her second play in that trilogy.
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Anne Boyd
#117888
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Anne Elizabeth Boyd AM is an Australian composer and emeritus professor of music at the University of Sydney. Early life Boyd was born in Sydney to James Boyd and Annie Freda Deason Boyd . Her father died when she was age 3, and her mother sent her to live with relatives on a sheep station near Longreach, in central Queensland. This intimate experience with the Australian landscape – its expansiveness, its dramatic changes, and its "indescribable energy" – had a profound influence on her future as a composer. She began composing while still at Maneroo, at the age of eight, for the resources she had available: recorder and voice.
Go to Profile#1500
Helen Loveday
#138710
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Helen Loveday is a lecturer in Chinese and Japanese art at the University of Geneva and curator of the Baur Foundation, Museum of Far Eastern Art, Geneva. She has written extensively on Asian art and translated a number of books.
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