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,
#2051
Iyanla Vanzant
#84414
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Iyanla Vanzant is an American inspirational speaker, lawyer, New Thought spiritual teacher, author, life coach, and television personality. She is known primarily for her books, her eponymous talk show, and her appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. From 2012 to 2021, she served as host of OWN's Iyanla: Fix My Life.
Go to Profile#2052
Liana Alexandra
#179199
Overall Influence
1947 - 2011 (64 years)
Liana Alexandra Septefrati was a Romanian composer, pianist and music educator. Biography Alexandra was born in Bucharest, Romania, on 27 May 1947. From 1965 to 1971, she studied at the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory under Tudor Ciortea and Tiberiu Olah and took composition courses in 1974, 1978, 1980 and 1984 in Darmstadt, Germany. She had a doctorate in musicology and taught composition, orchestration, and music analysis at the Conservatory from 1971 until her death in 2011. A prolific composer in the neoromantic style, Alexandra had over 100 of her works performed and published in Romania.
Go to Profile#2053
Judith Lang Zaimont
#164775
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Judith Lang Zaimont is an American composer and pianist. Biography Judith Lang Zaimont was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to a Jewish family. Both Zaimont and her sister, Doris Lang Kosloff, began piano lessons with their mother, Bertha Lang, who was an accomplished pianist and singer. Bertha was very active in the music profession and served as a president of the New York State Music Teachers Association. Judith began lessons at Juilliard at age 12, where she studied piano and theory from 1958-1964. These lessons included piano with Rosina Lhévinne and theory and duo-piano with Ann Hull. Judith...
Go to Profile#2054
Adriana Hölszky
#162007
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Adriana Hölszky is a Romanian-born German music educator, composer and pianist who has been living in Germany since 1976. Biography Hölszky was born in Bucharest. In the years 1959-1969 she studied piano with Olga Rosca-Berdan at the music school in Bucharest. In 1972, she began to study composition with Ştefan Niculescu as parallel to piano studies at the Bucharest Music Conservatory. In 1976 she moved with her family to Germany. Here she continued her studies, and in 1977-1980 she studied composition at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart with Milko Kelemen, and chamber music with Günter Louegk.
Go to Profile#2055
Honor McKellar
#181766
Overall Influence
1920 - Present (106 years)
Winifred Honor McKellar is a New Zealand former mezzo-soprano opera singer and singing teacher, and was the first full-time lecturer in singing at the University of Otago in Dunedin. Her students have included Jonathan Lemalu, Patrick Power and Matt Landreth. In 1989, she was awarded a Queen's Service Medal for services to music, and in 2012, she was made a life member of the New Zealand Association of Teachers of Singing.
Go to Profile#2056
Kristen Syrett
#174110
Overall Influence
Kristen Syrett is a linguist whose work focuses on language acquisition, psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics. Career Syrett completed her Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2007 as a student of Jeffrey Lidz, Christopher Kennedy, and Sandra Waxman, with a dissertation titled Learning about the structure of scales: Adverbial modification and the acquisition of the semantics of gradable adjectives.
Go to Profile#2057
Adrienne Shaw
#170962
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Adrienne Shaw is an American game studies scholar and Associate Professor at Temple University in the Klein College of Media and Communication. She is known for her work on queer theory and LGBTQ representation in video games. She is the author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, the co-editor of Queer Game Studies, and the founder of the LGBTQ Video Games Archive.
Go to Profile#2058
Elizabeth Stephens
#99885
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Elizabeth M. "Beth" Stephens is an American filmmaker, artist, sculptor, photographer, professor and two time Chair of the Art Department at UC Santa Cruz. Stephens, who describes herself as "ecosexual", collaborates with her wife since 2002, ecosexual artist, radical sex educator, and performer Annie Sprinkle.
Go to Profile#2059
Violaine Prince
#182406
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Violaine Prince is a French-Lebanese composer. Works Arabesques. Cycle du jour. Violin SonatasDe Profundis.Requiem
Go to Profile#2060
Salli Terri
#140808
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Salli C. Terri was a singer, arranger, recording artist, and composer. Record audiences still cite Terri's "haunting" vocals, with Hi-Fi Review originally describing her as "a mezzo soprano whose velvet voice and astonishing flexibility has hardly an equal at present."
Go to Profile#2061
Kathleen S. Kelly
#180351
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kathleen S. Kelly is an American public relations theorist and academic administrator. She is a professor and chair of the department of public relations at University of Florida. Kelly was the Hubert J. Bourgeois Research Professor in Communication at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She served as associate dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Kelly is a Fellow of the PRSA.
Go to Profile#2062
Cecilia Vicuña
#124685
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which her fibre art quipus, knotted or unknotted strings, palabrarmas and precarios, made from natural, delicate materials, stand out.
Go to Profile#2063
Elsie Ivancich Dunin
#137971
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Elsie Ivancich Dunin is a dance ethnologist , choreographer, professor and author specializing in folk dance from Croatia, Macedonia, and Romani in Macedonia. Her studies focus on Croatian diaspora communities and associated sword dances in both Old and New World contexts. She is Professor Emerita of dance ethnology from the University of California at Los Angeles and is currently a dance research advisor with the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, Croatia. Her two daughters are Teresa and Elonka Dunin.
Go to Profile#2064
Jigna Desai
#137980
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jigna Desai is a Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies, currently at the University of Minnesota. She is a writer, teacher, mentor, artist, and engaged researcher whose scholarship crosses many fields of study including transnational feminism, Asian American Studies, queer studies, postcolonial feminism, critical disability studies, critical youth studies, feminist media studies, critical ethnic studies, and critical university studies. She has also written extensively on issues of racial and gender disparities and social justice.
Go to Profile#2065
Samantha Womack
#170836
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Samantha Zoe Womack is an English actress, singer, model and director who has worked in film, television and stage. Womack initially planned a career in singing and she represented the United Kingdom in the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest. Her song for the contest, "A Message to Your Heart", was released as her first single in April 1991 and reached number 30 in the UK Singles Chart.
Go to Profile#2066
Angel Blue
#140715
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Angel Joy Blue is an American soprano. She won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for the Metropolitan Opera production of Porgy and Bess in the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. Her voice has been recognized for its shining and agile upper register, "smoky" middle register, beautiful timbre, and ability to switch from a classical to a contemporary sound. She has performed internationally and won numerous awards including a Grammy Award, Operalia and Miss Hollywood. According to family lore, her father Sylvester predicted her to be "the next Leontyne Price" when she was born.
Go to Profile#2067
Blanche Thebom
#153130
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Blanche Thebom was an American operatic mezzo-soprano, voice teacher, and opera director. She was part of the first wave of American opera singers that had highly successful international careers. In her own country she had a long association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City which lasted 22 years. Opera News stated, "An ambitious beauty with a velvety, even-grained dramatic mezzo, Thebom was a natural for opera: she commanded the stage with the elegantly disciplined hauteur of an old-school diva, relishing the opportunity to play femmes du monde such as Marina in Boris Godunov, He...
Go to Profile#2068
Susan B. Anthony II
#67186
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Susan Brownell Anthony II was an American journalist and writer, activist and substance abuse counselor. She grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Rochester, graduating in 1938. During her schooling, she became an activist in progressive causes, but she also struggled with alcoholism. She supported pacifism, the anti-fascist movement, housing desegregation, and women's rights, including advocacy to remove the poll tax as an obstacle to women's suffrage, as well as childcare centers for working mothers. She worked as a reporter for The Washington Star and completed a ...
Go to Profile#2069
Margaret Rizza
#181205
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Margaret Rizza is an English composer, primarily of church music. She taught singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1977 to 1994. Life Margaret Rizza was born in 1929 into a musical family, where her mother played piano and her father was the organist for his local parish church. She attended the Royal College of Music from age 17 to study piano, at which she admits she was not particularly proficient. However, she soon switched to studying singing, and completed her training first at the National School of Opera in London and then at Siena and Rome in Italy, after which she pursued a career as an opera singer, using the name Margaret Lensky, for 25 years.
Go to Profile#2070
Radhika Parameswaran
#174902
Overall Influence
Radhika Parmeswaran holds an endowed Herman B. Wells chair at Indiana University, Bloomington. A professor and former chair of journalism there, Parameswaran has published in leading journals, contributing to analysis of the ways in which colonialism, nationalism and globalization shape the social construction of modernity and gender.
Go to Profile#2071
Ruby Keeler
#147798
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Ethel Ruby Keeler was an American actress, dancer, and singer who was paired on-screen with Dick Powell in a string of successful early musicals at Warner Bros., particularly 42nd Street . From 1928 to 1940, she was married to actor and singer Al Jolson. She retired from show business in the 1940s, but made a widely publicized comeback on Broadway in 1971.
Go to Profile#2072
Sarah Buxton
#101353
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Sarah Jane Buxton is an American country music singer formerly signed to the independent Lyric Street Records. Between 2006 and 2008, she issued three singles from an extended play titled Almost My Record, in addition to co-writing her song "Stupid Boy", which was later recorded by Keith Urban. She released her self-titled debut album in early 2010, led off by the Top 25 single "Outside My Window," shortly before Lyric Street Records closed.
Go to Profile#2073
Janice Harsanyi
#175512
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Janice Harsanyi was an American soprano singer and college professor. Janice was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and lived in the Hamilton Square section of Hamilton Township, Mercer County, New Jersey at an early age. Harsanyi married Nicholas Harsanyi, a violist who went to school with Béla Bartók in Hungary. Nikki founded the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra in 1979, his wife, Janice, was known as "first lady" of the TSO. Nicholas Harsanyi died in 1987.
Go to Profile#2074
Suzannah Clark
#162014
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Suzannah Clark is a Canadian-British musicologist and music theorist specializing in the music of Franz Schubert, the history of music theory, and medieval music. She is currently Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music and in 2019 was named Harvard College Professor at Harvard University and from 2016–2019 served as chair of the Music Department at Harvard.
Go to Profile#2075
Karen Ashcraft
#149414
Overall Influence
Karen Ashcraft is an American communication scholar and professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her area of research is in social justice and organizational studies. She looks at identity in the workplace and organizational structures. Specifically she studies issues of diversity, hybrid organizations, gender and power. Being an organizational communication scholar, she sees discourse as central to understanding our human condition as well as how communication amounts to organizing. She examines discourse through a lens of a feminist communicology model to look at the critical ro...
Go to Profile#2076
Marla Gibbs
#136492
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Marla Gibbs is an American actress, singer, comedian, writer and television producer whose career spans seven decades. Gibbs is known for her role as George Jefferson's maid, Florence Johnston, in the CBS sitcom The Jeffersons , for which she received five nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
Go to Profile#2077
Carolin Widmann
#179409
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Carolin Widmann is a German classical violinist. She focuses mainly on contemporary music. She plays a violin made in 1782 by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini. Career Born in Munich, Widmann studied with Igor Ozim in Cologne, Michèle Auclair in Boston and David Takeno in London. As a soloistist she has been conducted by Sir Roger Norrington, Sylvain Cambreling, Heinz Holliger, Riccardo Chailly, Sir Simon Rattle, Vladimir Jurowski, Daniel Harding and Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has collaborated with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Wolfgang Rihm, Salvatore Sciarrino, Enno Poppe and Rebecca Saunders, who have written several works especially for her.
Go to Profile#2078
Charo
#167857
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza, professionally known by her stage name Charo, is a Spanish-born actress, singer, comedian, and flamenco guitarist who rose to international prominence in the 1960s on American television, as well as starring in several films.
Go to Profile#2079
Mildred Miller
#168743
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Mildred Miller was an American classical mezzo-soprano who had a major career performing in operas, concerts, and recitals during the mid twentieth century. She was notably a principal artist at the Metropolitan Opera from 1951 through 1974. In 1978 she founded the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, serving as the company's Artistic Director through 1999.
Go to Profile#2080
Hilda Paredes
#175661
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Hilda Paredes is one of Mexico's leading contemporary composers, and has received many prestigious awards for her work. She currently resides in London, and is married to the noted English violinist, Irvine Arditti.
Go to Profile#2081
Julia Reichert
#136223
Overall Influence
1946 - 2022 (76 years)
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
Go to Profile#2082
Sarah Hawkins
#183188
Overall Influence
Sarah Hawkins is a British phonetician and Emeritus Professor of Speech and Music Science at Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.
Go to Profile#2083
Orin O'Brien
#129176
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Orin O'Brien is an American double bassist. She has been a member of the New York Philharmonic since joining in 1966 under the direction of Leonard Bernstein; she was the first woman to join the orchestra. She was on the faculty at the Juilliard School , and currently teaches at Manhattan School of Music, and Mannes College The New School for Music. O'Brien is also currently on the Preparatory Division faculty at the Manhattan School.
Go to Profile#2084
Jody Diamond
#144840
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jody Diamond is an American composer, performer, writer, publisher, editor, and educator. She specializes in traditional and new music for Indonesian gamelan and is active internationally as a scholar, performer, and publisher.
Go to Profile#2085
Natasha Bertrand
#27183
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Natasha Bertrand is an American journalist who is a Pentagon correspondent for CNN covering national security. Early life and career Bertrand attended Vassar College and the London School of Economics, where she double-majored in political science and philosophy and graduated in 2014.
Go to Profile#2086
Mary Featherston
#179362
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mary Bronwyn Featherston is an Australian interior designer and designer of child-friendly play and learning environments. She is known both for her furniture and design collaboration with Grant Featherston, as well as her work researching and designing educational spaces for children. Featherston was inducted into the Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame in 1996. She is currently Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University.
Go to Profile#2087
Mara Servetto
#125502
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Margherita Servetto , better known as Mara, is an Italian architect and designer. Biography She studied at the Polytechnic University of Turin, where she received her degree in architecture under the supervision of Achille Castiglioni. When Castiglioni obtained a teaching position at the Polytechnic University of Milan, she moved to Milan in order to collaborate with Castiglioni, which she did until 1990.
Go to Profile#2088
Ruth Hohmann
#182445
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Ruth Hohmann is a German jazz singer and university lecturer. She was known as the "First Lady of East German Jazz" and was for a long time the GDR's only jazz singer of note, playing a major role in the dissemination of the music in the country.
Go to Profile#2089
Tasha Hubbard
#169662
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Tasha Hubbard is a Canadian First Nations/Cree filmmaker and educator based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hubbard's credits include three National Film Board of Canada documentaries exploring Indigenous rights in Canada: Two Worlds Colliding, a 2004 Canada Award-winning short film about the Saskatoon freezing deaths, Birth of a Family, a 2017 feature-length documentary about four siblings separated during Canada's Sixties Scoop, and nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, a 2019 Hot Docs and DOXA Documentary award-winning documentary which examines the death of Colten Boushie, a young Cree man, and ...
Go to Profile#2090
Yekaterina Chemberdzhi
#172590
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Yekaterina Chemberdzhi , also Katia Tchemberdji or Jekaterina Wladimirowna Tschemberdschi , is a Russian pianist and composer. Life and career The daughter of Vladimir Posner and Valentina Chemberdzhi and granddaughter of the composers Zara Levina and Nikolai Chemberdzhi, Katia Chemberdzhi was born in Moscow and began her study of music at age 7. In 1978 she studied composition and piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolai Korndorf and Yuri Kholopov.
Go to Profile#2091
Fyokla Tolstaya
#163403
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Fyokla Nikitichna Tolstaya , also known as Fekla Tolstoy, is a Russian journalist, cultural figure, and TV and radio presenter. She is the great-great-granddaughter of the author Leo Tolstoy. Biography Fyokla Tolstaya was born Anna Nikitichna Tolstaya on 27 February 1971 in Moscow. She holds a degree in Slavic philology from the Moscow State University and trained as a director at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts .
Go to Profile#2092
Alison McIntosh
#182398
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Alison J. McIntosh is a New Zealand tourism and hospitality academic. Previously a professor at the University of Waikato, she is now a professor at Auckland University of Technology. Her research areas include Critical Tourism and Hospitality, Tourist Behaviour and Heritage and Cultural Tourism.
Go to Profile#2093
Jeanne Jordan
#179431
Overall Influence
Jeanne Jordan is an American independent director, producer and editor. She was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards.
Go to Profile#2094
Edith Peinemann
#140878
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Edith Peinemann was an internationally recognized German violinist and professor of violin. At age nineteen she won the ARD International Music Competition in Munich, and made her U.S. debut as soloist in 1962 with Max Rudolf, after which she became a protégé of George Szell. In 2005 she became president of the European String Teachers Association.
Go to Profile#2095
Jacqueline Fontyn
#173865
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jacqueline, Baroness Fontyn is a contemporary Belgian composer, pianist and music educator. She was born in Antwerp, and has received the title of baroness from the King of Belgium in recognition of her many artistic contributions.
Go to Profile#2096
Katherine W. Phillips
#128724
Overall Influence
1972 - 2020 (48 years)
Katherine Williams Phillips was an American business theorist and the Reuben Mark Professor of Organizational Character at Columbia University's Business School. She headed the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia, and was Senior Vice Dean.
Go to Profile#2097
Dorothy Runk Mennen
#107624
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Dorothy Runk Mennen was a pioneer in the creation of a voice curriculum for the university training of theatre actors and professional performers. She was also a prolific author regarding the training of the voice and Professor Emerita of Theatre at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#2098
Anne LeBaron
#168372
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Alice Anne LeBaron is an American composer and harpist. Career LeBaron was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She holds a B.A. in music from the University of Alabama , an M.A. in music from Stony Brook University , and a doctorate in music from Columbia University , where she studied with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky. As a Fulbright Scholar in 1980–81, she studied with Mauricio Kagel and György Ligeti LeBaron has also studied Korean traditional music at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul . Although trained in piano from childhood, she took up the harp in ...
Go to Profile#2099
Sarah Jaffe
#135876
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Sarah L. Jaffe is a labor journalist. She is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt and Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone . Jaffe is a columnist for The Progressive and New Labor Forum, and her work has appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The New Republic. She also cohosts a podcast called Belabored.
Go to Profile#2100
Du Yun
#158585
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Du Yun is a Chinese-born American composer, performer, vocalist and performance artist. She won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera Angel's Bone, with libretto by Royce Vavrek. She was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Du Yun was named as one of the 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2018, and received a 2019 Grammy nomination in the category of Best Classical Contemporary Composition for her work Air Glow. In its decade review, UK's Classic FM listed Du Yun's winning of the Pulitzer as No. 6 in "10 ways the 2010s changed classical music forever." Rolling Ston...
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