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,
#301
Nora Ephron
#20968
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Nora Ephron was an American journalist, writer, and filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing romantic comedy films and received numerous accolades including a British Academy Film Award as well as nominations for three Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award and three Writers Guild of America Awardss.
Go to Profile#302
Katherine Demuth
#67926
Overall Influence
Katherine Demuth is an American professor of linguistics and the director of the Child Language Lab at Macquarie University. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales in February 2018, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia .
Go to Profile#303
Lina Choueiri
#49869
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lina Choueiri is a Lebanese Associate Professor in Linguistics at the American University of Beirut . She was the Chairperson of the department of English from 2006 to 2009. Choueiri has been serving as AUB's first deputy provost since July 2021 and threatened severe sanctions against AUB's Secular Club for exercising free speech rights critical of AUB.
Go to Profile#304
Anne Dawson
#62368
Overall Influence
Anne Dawson is an English academic, formerly a broadcast journalist and television presenter. Journalism career After studying English at university, Salisbury-born Dawson began her career as a trainee journalist at a local newspaper before joining BBC South Today in Southampton as a production journalist, reporter and presenter. She also worked for the South East edition of TVS's regional news programme Coast to Coast, as a district reporter in Brighton and later, Maidstone.
Go to Profile#305
Artemis Alexiadou
#33569
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Artemis Alexiadou is a Greek linguist active in syntax research working in Germany. She is professor of English linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Education Alexiadou began her studies in Linguistics at the age of 17 at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. After graduating in 1990, Alexiadou undertook a master's degree at the University of Reading and then continued on to the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin. In 1994 Alexiadou gained a PhD from the University of Potsdam and also passed her Habilitation there in 1999.
Go to Profile#306
Lata Mangeshkar
#13233
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Lata Mangeshkar was an Indian playback singer and occasional music composer. She is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential singers of the Indian subcontinent. Her voice was one of the unifying elements of the people of South Asia across borders. Her contribution to the Indian music industry in a career spanning eight decades gained her honorific titles such as the "Queen of Melody", "Nightingale of India", and "Voice of the Millennium".
Go to Profile#307
Shobhana Chelliah
#28760
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Shobhana Chelliah is an Indian-American linguist who specializes in Sino-Tibetan languages. She is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of Research and Advancement at the College of Information, University of North Texas. Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India.
Go to Profile#308
Natalie Schilling
#49410
Overall Influence
Natalie A. Schilling is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Schilling received her PhD and BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA from North Carolina State University. Her 1996 PhD dissertation is entitled, The Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Status of /ay/ in Outer Banks English.
Go to Profile#309
Jacqueline Bishop
#36100
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer from Jamaica, who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University . She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Go to Profile#310
Julia Hahn
#27493
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (33 years)
Julia Aviva Hahn is an American writer. Between 2017 and 2021, she was deputy communications director in the Trump White House. Early life Hahn was born to a Jewish family, and grew up in Beverly Hills. She attended Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles. Her grandfather is Harold Honickman, the head of a successful soft-drink bottling company, who in 2002 was estimated to be worth $850 million.
Go to Profile#311
Nancy Armstrong
#15092
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Nancy Armstrong is a scholar, critic and professor of English at Duke University. Overview Before moving to Duke, Armstrong was the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture & Media, and Gender Studies at Brown University. She is currently the Gilbert, Louis & Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke. She is interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American fiction, empire and sexuality, narrative and critical theory, visual culture, and scientific discourses at work in literary forms. She is best known for her groundbreaking book o...
Go to Profile#312
Mary Snell-Hornby
#35044
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Mary Snell-Hornby is a British-Austrian translator and scholar. Career Mary Snell was awarded a State Scholarship to study at Saint Felix School, Southwold, Suffolk, where she attained G.C.E. Advanced and Scholarship Level in English, French and German in 1958. She studied English, French, German, and Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, where she obtained her MA with First Class Honours in German Language and Literature in 1962.
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Jan Hopkins
#45751
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jan Hopkins was the President of the Economic Club of New York from 2008–2015. She was the anchor of the daily CNN Financial News show "Street Sweep" from the New York Stock Exchange. Hopkins now runs her own strategic communications and marketing company.
Go to Profile#314
Anouk Aimée
#49179
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus , known professionally as Anouk Aimée or Anouk, is a French film actress who has appeared in 70 films since 1947, having begun her film career at age 14. In her early years, she studied acting and dance besides her regular education. Although the majority of her films were French, she also made films in Spain, Great Britain, Italy and Germany, along with some American productions.
Go to Profile#315
Kersti Börjars
#57645
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Professor Kersti Börjars is a linguist who is Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Education Börjars was educated in Sweden at Uppsala University , and then in the Netherlands at the University of Leiden before completing a PhD at the University of Manchester.
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Renee Botta
#48646
Overall Influence
Renee Botta is on the faculty of the Department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies at the University of Denver where she has conducted research on the relationship between media use and eating disorders among adolescents from diverse populations. She earned a Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the University of Denver she teaches courses in health communication, mass communication & public relations in many different graduate and undergraduate courses. Her main focus of work away from the University has been about increasing sanitation and clean water in slums such a...
Go to Profile#317
Jane Asher
#27516
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jane Asher is an English actress and author. She achieved early fame as a child actress and has worked extensively in film and TV throughout her career. Asher has appeared in TV shows and films such as Deep End , The Masque of the Red Death , Alfie , The Mistress, Crossroads, Death at a Funeral , and The Old Guys. She also appeared in two episodes of the 1950s TV series The Buccaneers alongside Robert Shaw. She was well known as the partner of Paul McCartney from 1963 to 1968.
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Martha Rosler
#12834
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
Go to Profile#319
Jane Setter
#52805
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jane Setter is a British phonetician. She teaches at the University of Reading, where she is Professor of Phonetics. She is best known for work on the pronunciation of British and Hong Kong English, and on speech prosody in atypical populations.
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Jane Campion
#25237
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion is a New Zealand filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing the critically acclaimed films The Piano and The Power of the Dog , for which she has received two Academy Awards , two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film.
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Chrystelle Trump Bond
#32859
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Chrystelle Lee Trump Bond was an American dancer, choreographer, dance historian, and author. Bond was the founding chair of the dance department at Goucher College. She was the co-founder and director of Chorégraphie Antique, the dance history ensemble at Goucher. Bond was a dance critic for The Baltimore Sun.
Go to Profile#322
Carmen de Lavallade
#17322
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Carmen de Lavallade is an American actress, choreographer and dancer. Early life De Lavallade was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 6, 1931, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised by her aunt, Adele, who owned one of the first African-American history bookshops on Central Avenue. De Lavallade's cousin, Janet Collins, was the first Creole/African descendant prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. The family was Catholic.
Go to Profile#323
Nancy Milford
#15356
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Nancy Lee Milford was an American biographer. She was noted for her biographies on Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Early life and education Nancy Lee Winston was born in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 26, 1938. Her father, Joseph Winston, worked as an engineer at General Motors and served in the United States Navy during World War II; her mother, Vivienne , was a housewife and volunteered at a Dearborn hospital. During her father's stint in the Navy, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., and San Francisco before going back to Michigan.
Go to Profile#324
Lynn Neary
#42133
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Lynn Neary is an American radio journalist. She is a correspondent on National Public Radio and on National Desk's Arts and Information Unit, covering books and publishing. Early years and education Neary was born and raised in Crestwood, Westchester County, NY. She earned a B.A. in English from Fordham University.
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Ágnes Gergely
#40584
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ágnes Gergely is a Hungarian writer, educator, journalist and translator. Biography She was born Ágnes Guttmann in family of Fenákel Rózsika and György Guttmann in Endrőd, a village on the Great Hungarian Plain. She took her pen name "Gergely" from the novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon by the Hungarian writer Géza Gárdonyi because Agnes Gergely wished to be courageous like the hero from the story, Gergely Bornemissza.
Go to Profile#326
María Catrileo
#46084
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
María Catrileo Chiguailaf de Codo is a native Mapuche linguist and professor of Spanish, English and Mapudungun language. In 2009, Catrileo received the Provincial Prize for Conservation of National Monuments for her studies of the native Mapudungun language. Catrileo's work has focused on the phonology and morpho-syntax of the Mapudungun language and specially the verb forms. She is considered to be perhaps the only living Mapuche Indian to be a master of Spanish, English and Mapudungun. Currently, she is working at the Institute of Linguistics and Literature of the Austral University of Ch...
Go to Profile#327
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
#39668
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz was an American biographer and writer on opera. She is mainly known for her biography of Giuseppe Verdi, a result of 30 years' research and published in 1992 by Oxford University Press. Born in Lebanon, Ohio and educated at Smith College and Columbia University, she lived for many years in Italy, and even after her return to the United States in the early 1970s spent her summers in Verdi's hometown of Busseto where she continued her exhaustive research into his life. She died in New York City at the age of 86, survived by three of her five children.
Go to Profile#328
Joan Jett
#15073
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Joan Jett is an American rock singer, guitarist, songwriter, record producer and actress. She is best known for her work as the frontwoman of her band Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and for founding and performing with the Runaways, who recorded and released the hit song "Cherry Bomb". With the Blackhearts, Jett is known for her rendition of the song "I Love Rock 'n Roll" which was number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1982. Jett's other notable songs include "Bad Reputation", "Light of Day", "I Hate Myself for Loving You" and her covers of "Crimson and Clover", "Do You Wanna...
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Julia Hirschberg
#14911
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.
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Kate Wilhelm
#15038
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Kate Wilhelm was an American author. She wrote novels and stories in the science fiction, mystery, and suspense genres, including the Hugo Award–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Wilhelm established the Clarion Workshop along with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson.
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Ringo Sheena
#25009
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
, known by her stage name , is a Japanese singer, songwriter and musician. She is also the founder and lead vocalist of the band Tokyo Jihen. She describes herself as "". She was ranked number 36 in a list of Japan's top 100 musicians compiled by HMV in 2003.
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Octavia E. Butler
#9828
Overall Influence
1947 - 2006 (59 years)
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author and a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
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Vivianne Crowley
#14407
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Vivianne Crowley is an author, university lecturer, psychologist, and a High Priestess and teacher of the Wiccan religion. Life She was initiated into the London coven of Alex Sanders at the age of eighteen, but later joined a Gardnerian coven in the famous Whitecroft line derived from Eleanor Bone, and so she was one of few people in the seventies to be part of both traditions.
Go to Profile#334
Patricia Neal
#27805
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Patricia Neal was an American actress of stage and screen. She is well known for, among other roles, playing World War II widow Helen Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still , radio journalist Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd , wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's , and the worn-out housekeeper Alma Brown in Hud . She also featured as the matriarch in the television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story ; her role as Olivia Walton was re-cast for the series it inspired, The Waltons. A major star of the 1950s and 1960s, she was the recipient of an Academy Aw...
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Deborah Cameron
#24872
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Deborah Cameron is a British linguist and feminist who currently holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University. Cameron is mainly interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. A large part of her academic research is focused on the relationship of language to gender and sexuality. She wrote the book The Myth of Mars And Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?, which was published in 2007.
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Robin Wright
#13407
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robin B. Wright , is an American foreign affairs analyst, author and journalist who has covered wars, revolutions and uprisings around the world. She writes for The New Yorker and is a fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Wright has authored five books and coauthored or edited three others.
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Patricia Alice Shaw
#56574
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Patricia Alice Shaw is a Canadian linguist specializing in phonology and known for her work on First Nations languages. Education and career Patricia Shaw was born in Montreal and moved at the age of 12 to Winnipeg. She received her B.A. in English from St. John's College of the University of Manitoba in 1967, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Toronto in 1973, and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Toronto in 1976 with a dissertation on Theoretical Issues in Dakota Phonology and Morphology.
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Nancy Kress
#19331
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Nancy Anne Kress is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain, which became a novel in 1993. She also won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2013 for After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, and in 2015 for Yesterday's Kin. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops. During the winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress was the Picador G...
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Ann Louise Bardach
#32695
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ann Louise Bardach [A.L. Bardach] is an American journalist and non-fiction author. Bardach is best known for her work on Cuba and Miami and was called "the go-to journalist on all things Cuban and Miami," by the Columbia Journalism Review, having interviewed dozens of key players including Fidel Castro, sister Juanita Castro, anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, CIA and Watergate plumber E. Howard Hunt, anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch and CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was present for the assassination of Che Guevara.
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Nik Safiah Karim
#57384
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Nik Safiah binti Nik Abdul Karim is a Malay language grammarian in Malaysia. She earned her PhD from Ohio University and is former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at University of Malaya.
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Sian Edwards
#51472
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Sian Edwards is an English conductor, best known as music director of English National Opera in the 1990s. Early life Sian Edwards was born in West Chiltington, West Sussex. She studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and later with the conductors Sir Charles Groves, Ilya Musin and Neeme Järvi. She won first prize in the 1984 Leeds International Conducting Competition, on the strength of which she was engaged for concerts with a number of British orchestras.
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Margaret Simons
#27804
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Margaret Simons is an Australian academic, freelance journalist and author. She has written numerous articles and essays as well as many books, including a biography of Senate leader of the Australian Labor Party Penny Wong and Australian minister for the environment Tanya Plibersek. Her essay Fallen Angels won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism.
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Susannah York
#44855
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
Susannah Yolande Fletcher , known professionally as Susannah York, was an English actress. Her appearances in various films of the 1960s, including Tom Jones and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? , formed the basis of her international reputation. An obituary in The Telegraph characterised her as "the blue-eyed English rose with the china-white skin and cupid lips who epitomised the sensuality of the swinging sixties", who later "proved that she was a real actor of extraordinary emotional range".
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Susan Gass
#55471
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Susan Gass is an American Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize-winner linguist. She is currently a professor emerita, retired from the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on applied linguistics with a special focus on second language learning, corrective feedback, and task-based language learning. She graduated in 1961 from Kingswood School Cranbrook.
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Marie-Lucie Tarpent
#61433
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Marie-Lucie Tarpent is a French-born Canadian linguist, formerly an associate professor of linguistics and French at Mount Saint Vincent University [MSVU], Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is known for her descriptive work on the Nisga'a language, a member of the Tsimshianic language family, and for her proof of the affiliation of the Tsimshianic languages to the Penutian language group.
Go to Profile#346
Hagit Borer
#47336
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Hagit Borer is a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research falls within the area of Generative Grammar. Borer also is an activist for the rights of Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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Carole Meredith
#41781
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Carole P. Meredith is an American grape geneticist and was a professor at the Department of Viticulture and Enology of University of California, Davis. Career Before she retired in 2003, Meredith and her research group pioneered the use of DNA typing to differentiate Vitis vinifera grape varieties and for elucidating their parentage, which gives insight into the varieties' history and place of origin. In 1996, Meredith and her research established the parentage of Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the first application of such techniques. Later, Chardonnay, Syrah, and Zinfandel followed. The research group showed that the varieties Zinfandel, Primitivo, and Crljenak Kaštelanski are identical.
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Ellen Prince
#52616
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Ellen F. Prince was an American linguist, known for her work in linguistic pragmatics. Education and career Prince earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. She served on the faculty there from 1974 until her retirement in 2005, including serving as chair of the department from 1993 to 1997. During her career, she contributed to more than 60 publications, 150 talks and presentations. She supervised 20 doctoral dissertations and served on dozens of dissertation committees at University of Pennsylvania and other universities around the world.
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Lita Talarico
#58810
Overall Influence
Lita Talarico is a co-founder and co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Design Program in New York City. She also co-founded the SVA Masters Workshop in Italy, an ongoing summer program. She also teaches and lectures on design entrepreneurism around the world.
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Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse
#41193
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse was a German book-binder, calligrapher and typographer. She also designed several typefaces. She was the 1991 winner of the Frederic W. Goudy Award. To mark her hundredth birthday in January 2018, Monotype released the titling typeface Hesse-Antiqua.
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