#551
Wim Crouwel
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Willem Hendrik "Wim" Crouwel was a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer. Early life and education Between 1947 and 1949, he studied Fine Arts at Academie Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands. After graduating from a traditional art school, he served for two years in the military. Fresh out of the military, he was hired by an exhibition company in Amsterdam. During an interview in 2011, Crouwel said that his traditional art training hadn't taught him anything about typography, and that he eventually learned it by attending night classes in typography at what is now the Gerri...
Go to Profile#552
William J. Gedney
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
William J. Gedney was an American linguist notable for his work on Thai and related Tai languages. Life Gedney was born in Orchards, Washington, and spent his childhood there. He was the son of John Marshall Gedney and Viola Gedney , the descendants of English immigrants. Gedney's father died of pneumonia in 1918, when Gedney was three years old. In 1935, Gedney graduated magna cum laude from Whitman College. After graduation, Gedney lived in Leavenworth, Washington and worked as a high school English teacher. During the summers, he occupied himself seriously with linguistics. After the outbr...
Go to Profile#553
Burton Watson
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Burton Dewitt Watson was an American sinologist, translator, and writer known for his English translations of Chinese and Japanese literature. Watson's translations received many awards, including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1982 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o. In 2015, at age 88, Watson was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation for his long and prolific translation caree...
Go to Profile#554
Forrest J Ackerman
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Forrest James Ackerman was an American magazine editor; science fiction writer and literary agent; a founder of science fiction fandom; a leading expert on science fiction, horror, and fantasy films; a prominent advocate of the Esperanto language; and one of the world's most avid collectors of genre books and film memorabilia. He was based in Los Angeles, California.
Go to Profile#555
Michelangelo Antonioni
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian director and filmmaker. He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"—L'Avventura , La Notte , and L'Eclisse —as well as the English-language film Blowup . His films have been described as "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" that feature elusive plots, striking visual composition, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes. His work substantially influenced subsequent art cinema. Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, being the only director to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden ...
Go to Profile#556
David Leonhardt
1973 - Present (51 years)
David Leonhardt is an American journalist and columnist. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. As of October 2018, he also co-hosted "The Argument", a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg.
Go to Profile#557
Richard Williams
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard Williams is a British music and sports journalist. As a writer, then deputy editor, of the weekly music newspaper Melody Maker , he became an influential commentator on the rise of new forms of rock music at the end of the 1960s. Williams and MM, as it was known, helped promote and contextualise the progressive in pop music. In particular, Williams wrote several key articles around 1970 that increased UK attention to the Velvet Underground. Melody Maker still covered jazz and Williams wrote about the more progressive developments in this field also.
Go to Profile#558
Johnny Cash
1932 - 2003 (71 years)
John R. Cash was an American country singer-songwriter. Most of Cash's music contains themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption, especially songs from the later stages of his career. He was known for his deep, calm bass-baritone voice, the distinctive sound of his Tennessee Three backing band characterized by train-like chugging guitar rhythms, a rebelliousness coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts, and a trademark all-black stage wardrobe, which earned him the nickname the "Man in Black".
Go to Profile#559
Claude Lelouch
1937 - Present (87 years)
Claude Barruck Joseph Lelouch is a French film director, writer, cinematographer, actor and producer. Lelouch grew up in an Algerian Jewish family. He emerged as a prominent director in the 1960s. Lelouch gained critical acclaim for his 1966 romantic melodrama film A Man and A Woman. At the 39th Academy Awards in 1967, A Man and a Woman won Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film. Lelouch was also nominated for Best Director. While his films have gained him international recognition since the 1960s, Lelouch's methods and style of film are known for attracting criticism.
Go to Profile#560
John Swales
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Malcolm Swales is a linguist best known for his work on genre analysis, particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric, discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes and, more recently, information science.
Go to Profile#561
George Hardie
1944 - Present (80 years)
George Hardie is an English graphic designer, illustrator and educator, best known for his work producing cover art for the albums of rock musicians and bands with the British art design group Hipgnosis.
Go to Profile#562
Michele Norris
1961 - Present (63 years)
Michele L. Norris is an American journalist. Since 2019, Norris has worked as an opinion columnist with The Washington Post. She is best known for co-hosting National Public Radio's evening news program All Things Considered from 2002 to 2011. She was the first African-American female host for NPR. Before that Norris was a correspondent for ABC News, as well as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Norris is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Go to Profile#563
Michael Wilbon
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michael Wilbon is an American commentator for ESPN and former sportswriter and columnist for The Washington Post. He is an analyst for ESPN and has co-hosted Pardon the Interruption on ESPN since 2001.
Go to Profile#564
Richie Zito
1952 - Present (72 years)
Richie Zito is an American songwriter, composer and record producer from Los Angeles. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Zito has experienced success as a prolific session musician, being featured on a wide array of other artists' recordings, including work with Joe Cocker, White Lion, Poison, Mr. Big, Neil Sedaka, Yvonne Elliman, Charlie Sexton, Eric Carmen, Art Garfunkel, Leo Sayer, Diana Ross, Marc Tanner, Elton John, Cher, The Motels, as well as The Cult, Eddie Money, Heart, Juliet Simms, Bad English and Prism.
Go to Profile#565
Ian Maddieson
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ian Maddieson is British-American linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, in the United States. He has served as Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association, and Secretary of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. Maddieson is best known for his work in phonetics, and phonological typology. He spent most of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he often collaborated with Peter Ladefoged in describing the patterns of speech sounds in the world's spoken languages.
Go to Profile#566
John Warrack
1928 - Present (96 years)
John Hamilton Warrack is an English music critic, writer on music, and oboist. Career Born in London, Warrack is the son of Scottish conductor and composer Guy Warrack. He was educated at Winchester College and the Royal College of Music . In the early 1950s he was a freelance oboist, playing mostly with the Boyd Neel Orchestra and Sadler's Wells Orchestra. From 1954 until 1961 he was music critic for The Daily Telegraph, and from 1961 until 1972 for The Sunday Telegraph. From 1978 until 1983 he served as the artistic director of the Leeds Festival. From 1984 until 1993 he taught on the musi...
Go to Profile#567
Roy Harris
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Roy Harris was a British linguist. He was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He also held university teaching posts in Hong Kong , Boston and Paris and visiting fellowships at universities in South Africa and Australia, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#568
Audrey Hepburn
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema and was inducted into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List.
Go to Profile#569
Jean-Paul Vinay
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Jean-Paul Vinay was a French-Canadian linguist. He is considered one of the pioneers in translation studies, along with Jean Darbelnet, with whom Vinay co-authored Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais , a seminal work in the field.
Go to Profile#570
John Kalodner
2000 - Present (24 years)
John David Kalodner is a retired American A&R executive. History John David Kalodner was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was a writer and photographer at Concert magazine. He went on to be a photographer for various record labels by 1972, as well as being a freelance music writer and photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He wanted to be in the record industry and was first noticed and hired as a publicist in 1974 by Atlantic Records executive Earl McGrath. His initial role at Atlantic was as a writer and photographer, while he continued to review concerts on the weekend for the ...
Go to Profile#571
Pieter Seuren
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren was a Dutch linguist, emeritus professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen.
Go to Profile#572
Paul Smolensky
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paul Smolensky is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond Washington. Along with Alan Prince, in 1993 he developed Optimality Theory, a grammar formalism providing a formal theory of cross-linguistic typology within linguistics. Optimality Theory is popularly used for phonology, the subfield to which it was originally applied, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics.
Go to Profile#573
Bob Edwards
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert Alan Edwards is an American broadcast journalist, a Peabody Award-winning member of the National Radio Hall of Fame. He hosted both of National Public Radio's flagship news programs, the afternoon All Things Considered, and Morning Edition, where he was the first and longest serving host in the latter program's history. Starting in 2004, Edwards then was the host of The Bob Edwards Show on Sirius XM Radio and Bob Edwards Weekend distributed by Public Radio International to more than 150 public radio stations. Those programs ended in September 2015. Edwards currently hosts a podcast f...
Go to Profile#574
Jon Caramanica
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jon Caramanica is an American journalist and pop music critic who writes for The New York Times. He is also known for writing about hip hop music. Biography Born in Brooklyn, New York, Caramanica received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1997, after which he attended Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published articles in Rolling Stone and Spin, before becoming a senior contributing writer for XXL. In 2006, he left XXL to become the music editor for Vibe, a position he held until leaving the magazine in 2008. He began working for The New York Times in 2010, after previously having freelanced for the paper.
Go to Profile#575
Maria Hinojosa
1961 - Present (63 years)
Maria de Lourdes Hinojosa Ojeda is a Mexican-American journalist. She is the anchor and executive producer of Latino USA on National Public Radio, a public radio show devoted to Latino issues. She is also the founder, president and CEO of Futuro Media Group, which produces the show. In 2022, Hinojosa won a Pulitzer Prize.
Go to Profile#576
Richard S. Kayne
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Stanley Kayne is Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics Department at New York University. Born in 1944, after receiving an A.B. in mathematics from Columbia College, New York City in 1964, he studied linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then taught at the University of Paris VIII , MIT and the City University of New York , becoming Professor at New York University in 1997.
Go to Profile#577
Léo Ferré
1916 - 1993 (77 years)
Léo Ferré was a French-born Monégasque poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer. He released some forty albums over this period, composing the music and the majority of the lyrics. He released many hit singles, particularly between 1960 and the mid-seventies. Some of his songs have become classics of the French chanson repertoire, including "Avec le temps", "C'est extra", "Jolie Môme" and "Paris canaille".
Go to Profile#578
Katharina Reiss
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Katharina Reiss was a German linguist and translation scholar. Her works are important in the field of translation studies. She is widely seen as a co-founder of the Skopos theory. Life Katharina Reiss was born in Rheinhausen, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine, and across the river from Duisburg into which, for administrative purposes, it has subsequently been subsumed. She passed her school finals exam in 1940 and went on to study between 1941 and 1944 at the Institute of Simultaneous Translation of Heidelberg University, where she received her first degree as a "professional translator".
Go to Profile#579
Dale Chihuly
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture". Early life Dale Patrick Chihuly was born on September 20, 1941, in Tacoma, Washington. His parents were George and Viola Chihuly; his paternal grandfather was born in Slovakia. In 1957, his older brother and only sibling George died in a Navy aviation training accident in Pensacola, Florida. In 1958, Chihuly's father died of a heart attack at the age of 51.
Go to Profile#580
C.M.I.M. Matthiessen
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christian Matthias Ingemar Martin Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics school, having authored or co-authored more than 100 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. One of his major works is Lexicogrammatical cartography , a 700-page study of the grammatical systems of English from the perspective of SFL. He has co-authored a number of books with Michael Halliday. Since 2008 he has been a professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Go to Profile#581
Don Kulick
1960 - Present (64 years)
Don Kulick is a Swedish anthropologist and linguist who is the professor of anthropology at Uppsala University. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
Go to Profile#582
Paul Levinson
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul Levinson is an American author, singer-songwriter, and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. His novels, short fiction, and non-fiction works have been translated into sixteen languages. He is frequently quoted in news articles and appears as a guest commentator on major news outlets.
Go to Profile#583
David Quantick
1961 - Present (63 years)
David Quantick is an English novelist, comedy writer and critic, who has worked as a journalist and screenwriter. A former freelance writer for the music magazine NME, his writing credits have included On the Hour, Blue Jam and TV Burp. He won an Emmy Award for Veep in 2015.
Go to Profile#584
Dave Eggers
1970 - Present (54 years)
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Go to Profile#585
Klaus Krippendorff
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Klaus Krippendorff was a communication scholar, social science methodologist, and cyberneticist. and was the Gregory Bateson professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. He wrote an influential textbook on content analysis and is the creator of the widely used and eponymous measure of interrater reliability, Krippendorff's alpha. In 1984–1985, he served as the president of the International Communication Association, one of the two largest professional associations for scholars for communication.
Go to Profile#586
Agnes de Mille
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Agnes George de Mille was an American dancer and choreographer. Early years Agnes de Mille was born in New York City into a well-connected family of theater professionals. Her father William C. deMille and her uncle Cecil B. DeMille were both Hollywood directors. Her mother, Anna Angela George, was the daughter of Henry George, the economist. On her father's side, Agnes was the granddaughter of playwrights Henry Churchill de Mille and Matilda Beatrice deMille. Her paternal grandmother was of German-Jewish descent.
Go to Profile#587
Herbert Schiller
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Herbert Irving Schiller was an American media critic, sociologist, author, and scholar. He earned his PhD in 1960 from New York University. Schiller warned of two major trends in his prolific writings and speeches: the private takeover of public space and public institutions at home, and U.S. corporate domination of cultural life abroad, especially in the developing nations. His eight books and hundreds of articles in both scholarly and popular journals made him a key figure both in communication research and in the public debate over the role of the media in modern society. He was widely kn...
Go to Profile#588
Mel Brooks
1926 - Present (98 years)
Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 18 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA F...
Go to Profile#589
Darrell Tryon
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Darrell T. Tryon was a New Zealand-born linguist, academic, and specialist in Austronesian languages. Specifically, Tryon specialised in the study of the languages of the Pacific Islands, particularly Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and the French-speaking Pacific.
Go to Profile#590
Suzette Haden Elgin
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Suzette Haden Elgin was an American researcher in experimental linguistics, construction and evolution of languages and poetry and science fiction writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Her best-known non-fiction includes her Verbal Self-Defense series.
Go to Profile#592
Brian Wilson
1942 - Present (82 years)
Brian Douglas Wilson is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded <!-- DO NOT CAPITALIZE -->the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition, extraordinary musical aptitude, and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, layered vocals, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson is also known for his formerly high-ranged sin...
Go to Profile#593
Winfried Nöth
1944 - Present (80 years)
Winfried Nöth is a German linguist and semiotician. After graduating from high school in 1963 in Brunswick, from 1965 to 1969 Nöth studied English, French and Portuguese in Münster, Geneva, Lisbon and Bochum, and in 1971 acquired his doctoral degrees at the Ruhr University Bochum. In Bochum he also habilitated in 1976 and became assistant to Walter A. Koch. After teaching in Bochum and Aachen, in 1978 he was appointed full professor in English Linguistics at the University of Kassel.
Go to Profile#594
Victor Yngve
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Victor H. Yngve was a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random but well-formed output sentences, given a text, a children's book called Engineer Small and the Little Train.
Go to Profile#595
Vito Acconci
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Vito Acconci was an American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others.
Go to Profile#596
Thomas Givon
1936 - Present (88 years)
Thomas Givon is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism", today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the University of Oregon. Givón advocates an evolutionary approach to language and communication.
Go to Profile#597
Théophile Obenga
1936 - Present (88 years)
Théophile Obenga is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism and an Afrocentrist. Obenga is an Egyptologist, linguist, and historian.
Go to Profile#598
Robert Fripp
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Fripp is an English musician, songwriter, record producer, and author, best known as the guitarist, founder and longest-lasting member of the progressive rock band King Crimson. He has worked extensively as a session musician and collaborator, notably with David Bowie, Blondie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall, The Roches, Talking Heads, and David Sylvian. He also composed the startup sound of Windows Vista operating system, in collaboration with Tucker Martine and Steve Ball. His discography includes contributions to over 700 official releases.
Go to Profile#599
Bappi Lahiri
1952 - 2022 (70 years)
Bappi Aparesh Lahiri , also known as Bappida was an Indian singer, composer and record producer. He popularised the use of synthesised disco music in Indian music industry and sang some of his own compositions. He was popular in the 1980s and 1990s with filmi soundtracks. He also delivered major box office successes in Bengali, Telugu, and Kannada films. His music was well received into the 21st century.
Go to Profile#600
Maynard Solomon
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Maynard Elliott Solomon was an American music executive and musicologist, a co-founder of Vanguard Records as well as a music producer. Later, he became known for his biographical studies of Viennese Classical composers, specifically Beethoven , Mozart , and Schubert. Solomon was the first to openly propose the highly disputed theory of Schubert's homosexuality in a scholarly setting.
Go to Profile