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).

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List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#1951

Regina Carter

#99451
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Regina Carter is an American jazz violinist. She is the cousin of jazz saxophonist James Carter. Early life Carter was born in Detroit and was one of three children in her family. She began piano lessons at the age of two after playing a melody by ear for her brother's piano teacher. After she deliberately played the wrong ending note at a concert, the piano teacher suggested she take up the violin, indicating that the Suzuki Method could be more conducive to her creativity. Carter's mother enrolled her at the Detroit Community Music School when she was four years old and she began studying the violin.
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#1952

Liina Pylkkänen

#179820
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Liina Pylkkänen is a Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at New York University. Her research considers the neurobiology of language and theoretical linguistics. Early life and education Pylkkänen grew up in Tampere, Finland. Pylkkänen studied philology at the University of Tampere. She was an undergraduate exchange student at the University of Pittsburgh, and decided to move there for her graduate studies. In 1997 she joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a doctoral researcher. Her doctorate explored verbal argument structure and cross-linguistic variations in introducing arguments.
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#1953

Helga Forner

#142600
Overall Influence
1936 - 2004 (68 years)
Helga Forner was a professor of singing at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig. She was one of the best-known German singing teachers before and after the Peaceful Revolution. Career Forner was born in Berlin. From 1954 to 1960 she studied singing at the Hochschule für Musik Leipzig, among others with Eva Fleischer. Afterwards, she taught singing at the Halle Conservatory for five years. In 1965 she received a teaching assignment at her former training centre in Leipzig. In 1978, after three rejections , she was appointed a lecturer for singing. In 1987 she received an extraordinary p...
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#1954

Anne Schwanewilms

Anne Schwanewilms
#164660
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Anne Schwanewilms is a German soprano who sings Lyric, Spinto, and Dramatic Soprano roles. She studied gardening before training in Cologne as a singer with the German bass Hans Sotin. She is particularly associated with performing the works of Richard Wagner, Franz Schreker, Alban Berg, and Richard Strauss.
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#1955

Lillian Fuchs

#168065
Overall Influence
1901 - 1995 (94 years)
Lillian Fuchs was an American violist, teacher and composer. She is considered to be among the finest instrumentalists of her time. She came from a musical family, and her brothers, Joseph Fuchs, a violinist, and Harry Fuchs, a cellist, performed with her on various recordings.
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#1956

Patricia Loew

#168720
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Patricia, "Patty" Loew is a journalist, professor, author, and community historian, broadcaster, documentary film maker, academic and advocate. She has written extensively about Ojibwe treaty rights, sovereignty and the role of Native American media in communicating Indigenous world views.
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#1957

Pamela Snow

#170354
Overall Influence
Pamela Claire Snow is an Australian speech-language pathologist and registered psychologist whose research concerns language disorders in vulnerable children and adolescents, and their implications for academic achievement and psychosocial wellbeing. She has been a vocal critic of pseudoscientific approaches to early reading instruction and support, such as the Arrowsmith Program.
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#1958

Noyuri Otsuka

#113712
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Noyuri Otsuka was a Japanese Christian scholar and researcher. Biography Otsuka was born in Tokyo in 1924. Her father, Tomiyoshi Otsuka, was a pastor and the founder of the Apostolic Church. Otsuka graduated from Tokyo Woman's Christian University, and also studied at Waseda University and Clark University in the United States. She held a research position at Yale University after graduating. Otsuka spent most of her career as a professor at Keisen University.
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#1959

Joan Trimble

#149471
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Joan Trimble was an Irish composer and pianist, and one of the most distinguished musicians to come from Ulster in the 20th century. She studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London, and she and her sister performed for many years as a celebrated piano duo. In later years she inherited her father's newspaper and became its proprietor and editor.
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#1960

Rosa Mannion

#176611
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Rosa Mannion is a British operatic soprano who has sung leading roles both in the opera houses of the UK and Europe and in the recording studio. Although particularly known for her roles in the operas of Handel and Mozart, she sang a wide repertoire during her career including Violetta in La traviata and all three of the leading female roles in The Tales of Hoffmann .
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#1961

Sanchita Bhattacharya

Sanchita Bhattacharya
#175745
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Sanchita Bhattacharya is an Indian playback singer, composer and television personality. At the age of 14, this makes her the oldest winner in the Sa Re Ga Ma Pa L'il Champs history as well as the first female winner with public voting. She has recorded songs for films and albums in various Indian languages.
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#1962

Eleanor Alberga

#175905
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Eleanor Deanne Therese Alberga is a Jamaican contemporary music composer who lives and works in the United Kingdom. Her most recent compositions include two Violin Concertos, a Trumpet Concerto and a Symphony.
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#1963

Julie L. Green

#168650
Overall Influence
1961 - 2021 (60 years)
Julie Lynn Green was an American artist known for making paintings about food, fashion, and capital punishment. She spent half of each year on her work, The Last Supper, a series of 1000 plates, illustrating final meals of U.S. death row inmates.
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#1964

Gaya Herrington

#68453
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Gaya Herrington is a Dutch econometrician, sustainability researcher, and women's rights activist. Herrington is best known for being the founder of the project and foundation Stop Straatintimidatie, an initiative seeking to criminalize street harassment in the Netherlands, and for her activism and research on sustainability issues.
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#1965

Nobuko Imai

#131352
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
, is a Japanese classical violist with an extensive career as soloist and chamber musician. Since 1988 she has played a 1690 Andrea Guarneri instrument. Biography Born in Tokyo, Imai began her musical training at the age of six. She began studying at Tokyo's Toho Gakuen School of Music and switched to viola there. Then she went to the United States where she studied at the Juilliard School and Yale University. She won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in 1967 and won highest prize at both the Geneva International Music Competition and ARD International Music Competition at Muni...
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#1966

Beverly Wolff

#157344
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Beverly Wolff was an American mezzo-soprano who had an active career in concerts and operas from the early 1950s to the early 1980s. She performed a broad repertoire which encompassed operatic and concert works in many languages and from a variety of musical periods. She was a champion of new works, notably premiering compositions by Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, and Ned Rorem among other American composers. She also performed in a number of rarely heard baroque operas by George Frideric Handel with the New York City Opera , the Handel Society of New York, and at the K...
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#1967

Constance Weldon

#77114
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Constance Weldon was an American tuba player, who was the first woman to play the instrument in a major American orchestra. Early life Constance Janet Weldon was born in Winter Haven, Florida, on January 25, 1932. Her father, George, was a groundskeeper and soon after Weldon was born the family moved to Miami, where he worked on the Vizcaya estate. Her mother Edythe Roebke was a teacher. Weldon started playing instruments at school, and by the time she was due to graduate from Miami Jackson High School, she had decided to study at the University of Miami and specialise in tuba performance. Sh...
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#1968

Mina Cheon

Mina Cheon
#126250
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Mina Cheon is a Korean American new media artist, scholar, and educator. Since 1997, she has been living between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul. Early life and education Cheon was born in Seoul, South Korea. Being the daughter of a South Korean diplomat and cultural attache, she grew up in the cities of Seoul, New York, Copenhagen, and Ottawa.
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#1969

Zinka Zorko

Zinka Zorko
#36749
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Zinka Zorko was a Slovenian linguist and academic. Her research focused on phonetic, theological, syntactic, and vocabulary phenomena of Carinthian, Styrian, and Pannonian dialect groups. In 2003, she was elected a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a decade later, she received the Zois Lifetime Achievement Award.
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#1970

Barbara Lea

#169011
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Barbara Lea was an American jazz singer. Music career Lea was born and raised in Detroit. Her father was a clarinetist before becoming attorney general of Michigan. He changed the family name from LeCocq to Leacock, which she changed to Lea when beginning her singing career. She decided at an early age to become a singer, participating in contests and singing with dance bands. She attended Wellesley College near Boston and studied music theory. She worked at the Storyville club when singer Lee Wiley performed there in the early 1950s. Her debut solo album, Woman in Love, was released in 1955.
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#1971

Josephine Yaroshevich

#185033
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Josephine Yaroshevich is a painter and pioneer in the field of Computer Art. Biography Josephine Yaroshevich was born in Kharkiv to a Jewish family, and grew up in Odesa. She studied art at Odesa with well-known painters Lev Mejberg and Zoy Ivnitzkaia. She also studied at the Moscow Art Academy under the guidance of professor Volia Nikolatvich Liahov. She taught at the Stroganoff Academy and Polygraphists Institute, and worked at the famous Taganka Theater, both in Moscow. There, she was associated with Nonconformistss Group. The origins of her art stem from the Russian Avant-garde; Kandinsky...
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#1972

Sarah Hutchings

#150782
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Sarah Hutchings née Reneer is an American composer of contemporary opera, art song, and choral works. Life and career Hutchings was born Sarah Reneer in Lexington, Kentucky, on September 27, 1984, and raised in Durham, North Carolina, where she had her first music lessons at the age of four.
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#1973

Linda Sillitoe

#92043
Overall Influence
1948 - 2010 (62 years)
Linda Buhler Sillitoe was an American journalist, poet and historian. She is best known for her journalistic coverage about Mark Hofmann and the "Mormon forgery murders." Her subsequent book Salamander, coauthored with Allen Roberts, examined Hofmann's creation of an industry for forged documents, the 1985 bombing murders of two people, and the police investigation, arrest and conviction. The murder investigation eventually revealed Hofmann's documents, initially seen as undermining the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were forgeries. Sillitoe’s published wo...
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#1974

Chris Clark

Chris Clark
#119807
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Christine Elizabeth Clark , better known as Chris Clark, is an American soul, jazz, and blues singer, who recorded for Motown Records. Clark became known to Northern Soul fans for hit songs such as 1965's "Do Right Baby Do Right" and 1966's "Love's Gone Bad" . She later co-wrote the screenplay for the 1972 motion picture Lady Sings the Blues starring Diana Ross, which earned Clark an Academy Award nomination.
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#1975

Gabriella Hermon

#180119
Overall Influence
Gabriella Hermon is an American linguist, professor emerita at the University of Delaware. Career Hermon received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois in 1981, and has taught at San Diego State University, and the University of Illinois, as well as the University of Delaware.
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#1976

Hertha Töpper

#127997
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Hertha Töpper was an Austrian contralto in opera and concert, and an academic voice teacher. A member of the Bavarian State Opera, she appeared in leading roles at major international opera houses and festivals.
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#1977

Linda George

#121515
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Linda George is an Assyrian-American singer known for her sentimental ballads and dance songs. The vast majority of her songs are sung in her native Syriac-Aramaic language, though a few are in English and Arabic.
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#1978

Sarah Dougher

Sarah Dougher
#124013
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sarah Dougher is an American singer-songwriter, author, and teacher. Dougher began her musical career playing the Farfisa organ in the Portland, Oregon based band The Crabs, and later joined Cadallaca with Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Corin Tucker. She has also released multiple solo albums.
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#1979

Lilly Irani

#153741
Overall Influence
Lilly Christine Irani is an American academic whose research spans topics in computer science, communication studies, feminist studies, entrepreneurship, and microwork. She is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
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#1980

Akiko Kobayashi

#114762
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
, also known by her alias Holi, is a Japanese singer, songwriter, composer and arranger. Kobayashi collaborated with Brian Eno and U2 on their 1995 project, the Passengers. Her smash hit debut song, from 1985s popular show "Kinyōbi no Tsumatachi e" made her famous in Japan.
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#1981

D'Anna Fortunato

#175591
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
D'Anna Fortunato is an American mezzo-soprano. She has long been an admired favorite on the American orchestral-concert scene, while establishing herself as a respected operatic artist as well. Of her New York City Opera debut in Handel's Alcina, the New Yorker called her "a Handelian of crisp accomplishment".
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#1982

Doris Troy

Doris Troy
#149619
Overall Influence
1937 - 2004 (67 years)
Doris Troy was an American R&B singer and songwriter, known to her fans as "Mama Soul". Her biggest hit was "Just One Look", a top 10 hit in 1963. Life and career She was born as Doris Elaine Higginsen, in the Bronx, the daughter of a Barbadian Pentecostal minister. She later took her grandmother's name and grew up as Doris Payne. Her parents disapproved of "subversive" forms of music like rhythm & blues, so she cut her teeth singing in her father's choir. At age 16, she was working as an usherette at the Apollo where she was discovered by James Brown. Under the name Doris Payne, she began so...
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#1983

Walburga Litschauer

#154895
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Walburga Litschauer is an Austrian musicologist and Franz Schubert scholar. Life Born in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Litschauer studied music and theatre studies at the University of Vienna and completed piano training at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. In 1979, she passed the State examination in piano, in 1980 she received her doctorate and in 2005 her habilitation at the University of Vienna. In 2015, the professional title "Professor" was conferred on her.
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#1984

Martha Burns

#117415
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Martha Burns is a Canadian actress known for her stage work and youth outreach in Ontario and her leading role as Ellen Fanshaw in the TV dramedy series Slings and Arrows. Early life Burns was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She studied at the University of Alberta and the Vancouver Playhouse's Acting School.
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#1985

Barbara Albert

Barbara Albert
#154594
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Barbara Albert is an Austrian writer, film-producer and film-director. She studied filmmaking at the Wiener Filmakademie. Her first film to become known to a larger audience was Nordrand, which describes the reality of life of Yugoslavian children in Vienna.
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#1986

Susan van den Heever

#169947
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Susan Claire van den Heever is a South African atmospheric scientist who is a professor at Colorado State University. Her research considers cloud physics and mesoscale modelling. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and an editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
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#1987

Margalit Oved

#127505
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Margalit Oved is an American-Israeli dancer and choreographer, who was born in the Aden Protectorate. After being airlifted to Israel in 1949 in Operation Magic Carpet, she became involved with the Inbal Dance Theater for the following 15 years. She then moved the United States, where she taught at University of California, Los Angeles. Oved later returned to the Inbal Dance Theatre, and also worked with her son's Barak Marshall Theaterdance. She also founded her own group, the Margalit Dance Theatre Company in Los Angeles.
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#1988

Jacqueline Samuda

Jacqueline Samuda
#165606
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jacqueline Samuda is a Canadian actress, director and writer. Biography Samuda was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and grew up in both the United States and Canada. She received a B.F.A. Degree in Performance from York University in Toronto, and apprenticed at the prestigious Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the Lake, Ontario. An experienced film/TV/stage/voice actress, Jacqueline has appeared in recurring roles on TV's Spooksville, The L Word and the epic sci-fi series Stargate SG-1 and in many other feature film, TV episodic and animation projects. She is a busy voiceover performer who has voiced many i...
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#1989

Anna Moffo

Anna Moffo
#170304
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Anna Moffo was an American opera singer, television personality, and actress. One of the leading lyric-coloratura sopranos of her generation, she possessed a warm and radiant voice of considerable range and agility. Noted for her physical beauty, she was nicknamed "La Bellissima".
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#1990

Suman Kalyanpur

#117483
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Suman Kalyanpur is an Indian playback singer who is most notable for her work in Hindi cinema. She recorded songs for movies in several languages besides Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Bengali, Odia and Punjabi.
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#1991

Lidia Milka-Wieczorkiewicz

#168030
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Lidia Anna Milka-Wieczorkiewicz is a Polish historian and diplomat, ambassador to Algeria and Tunisia . Life Education and academic work Milka-Wieczorkiewicz was born on 29 May 1956 in Niegoszowice. She graduated from high school in Dąbrowa Górnicza. Following her studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, in 1979, she graduated in history from the University of Warsaw. She started academic career there. In 1988, she defended her doctoral thesis on France–Morocco relations. As a scientist, she has been interested in history of Middle East and North Africa countries. She has been carr...
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#1992

S. P. Sailaja

S. P. Sailaja
#118663
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Sripathi Panditaradhyula Sailaja is an Indian singer and actress who had sung 7000 songs in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi films. She had sung most of the songs for Illayaraja , K. Chakravarthy , Ramesh Naidu, K.V. Mahadevan. In Tamil her most of hits are in Illayaraja , Chandra Bose music.
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#1993

Kathleen Kelly

#167539
Overall Influence
Kathleen Kelly is an American conductor, coach, and collaborative pianist. She has worked with the world's leading opera companies and young artist programs, including The Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, and San Francisco Opera, among others. She is currently on the faculty of the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
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#1994

Louise Wilson

#95731
Overall Influence
1962 - 2014 (52 years)
Louise Janet Wilson was a British professor of fashion design. Louise Wilson was based at the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, where she was the course director of their MA in Fashion from 1992 until 2014. Her former students include Alexander McQueen, Jonathan Saunders, Louise Goldin, Christopher Kane, Marios Schwab, Peter Jensen, Richard Nicoll, Christopher Shannon, Yu Lun Eve Lin, Charles Jeffrey and Sophia Kokosalaki.
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#1995

Amy Kravitz

#172879
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Amy Kravitz is an independent filmmaker and teacher specializing in abstract animation. She is currently a Professor in the Film Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Work As a young girl, Amy Kravitz began making and teaching animation in Yvonne Andersen's famed Yellow Ball Workshop. Amy went on to obtain a B.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and received an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts. During her studies at CalArts, she was mentored under Sky David and Jules Engel. She taught Animation at Harvard and the School of the Mu...
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#1996

Karabo Poppy

#178118
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Karabo Poppy Moletsane is a South African illustrator, graphic designer, and street artist. Early life Poppy was born in Vereeniging. She studied at Open Window Institute in Pretoria and has a degree in Visual Communication.
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#1997

Annemarie Roelofs

#156645
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Annemarie Roelofs is a Dutch trombone player, violinist, and professor at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. She was a member of Henry Cow and the Feminist Improvising Group. Biography Roelofs studied violin at the Amsterdam Conservatory, and played trombone as a secondary instrument. She also enrolled in a course on free improvisation at the Conservatory and began improvising on trombone in salsa bands. In December 1977 Roelofs, unplanned and unannounced, played her trombone with Henry Cow at a concert at a club in Amsterdam. Impressed with her improvising, they invited her to join the band.
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#1998

Jill Godmilow

#154253
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jill Godmilow is an American independent filmmaker, primarily of non-fiction works, and an advocate for Post-Realism in documentary. She is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Godmilow is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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#1999

Salem Mekuria

#107029
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Salem Mekuria is an Ethiopian-born independent filmmaker, video artist and educator living in the United States. Life and work Mekuria was born in Addis Ababa. She was educated there and in Axum, and moved to the United States in 1967 where she studied political science and journalism at Macalester College. Mekuria earned a MA in education technology and media production from San Francisco State University in 1978. She later worked at the WGBH TV station in Boston, starting as a secretary but eventually becoming a producer for the Nova series. Mekuria is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women's...
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#2000

Jane Ira Bloom

#125555
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jane Ira Bloom is an American jazz soprano saxophonist and composer. Early years Bloom was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Joel and Evelyn Bloom. She began as a pianist and drummer, later switching to the alto saxophone, and eventually settling on the soprano saxophone as her primary instrument. She first began playing the saxophone at age 9, studying with woodwind virtuoso Joseph Viola, chair of the Berklee College of Music Woodwinds Department, from 1968 to 1979, and studying music at Yale University from which she received a liberal arts degree and a master's degree in music . Following Yale, Bloom relocated to New York City.
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