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 people in Communications,
#4451
Hans Basbøll
#83580
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Hans Basbøll is a Danish linguist and professor of Nordic languages at the University of Southern Denmark since 1975, member of Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab since 1991 and member of Dansk Sprognævn, the official regulatory body of Danish, in 1991–97. Basbøll has written much on various aspects of Danish, which includes The Phonology of Danish , one of the most complete and authoritative sources on modern Danish phonology, and is currently working at the Center for Child Language at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. A Festschrift honouring Basbøll was published in ...
Go to Profile#4452
Sadateru Arikawa
#64806
Overall Influence
1930 - 2003 (73 years)
Sadateru Arikawa was a Japanese aikido teacher and Aikikai Hombu Dojo shihan, and "one of the few remaining giants of the postwar generation of instructors that played a predominant role in the dissemination of the art worldwide."
Go to Profile#4453
Mark Lindsay
#59594
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Mark Lindsay is an American musician, best known as the lead singer of the rock band Paul Revere & the Raiders. Early life Lindsay was born in Eugene, Oregon, and was the second of eight children of George and Esther Ellis Lindsay. The family moved to Idaho when he was young, where he attended Wilder High School.
Go to Profile#4454
Diana Der Hovanessian
#75930
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Diana Der Hovanessian , Armenian American poet, translator, and author. Much of the subject of her poetry was about Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. She wrote and published over twenty-five books. Life and career Diana Der Hovanessian was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an Armenian family. She received her education at Boston University, majoring in English, and then continued her education at Harvard University, studying under Robert Lowell. She became an American literature professor at Yerevan State University, and twice a Fulbright Professor of Armenian Poetry. She led many worksho...
Go to Profile#4455
Garnett Brown
#107692
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Garnett Brown was an American jazz trombonist who worked with The Crusaders, Herbie Hancock, Lionel Hampton, Earth Wind and Fire and others. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he graduated from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and later studied film scoring and electronic music at UCLA. In 1974 he won the Down Beat Reader's poll for trombonist, and appears on the classic 1976 recording Bobby Bland and B.B. King Together Again...Live.
Go to Profile#4456
Gary Wolf
#28889
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Gary Wolf is an American writer, contributing editor at Wired magazine, and co-founder of the Quantified Self. Wolf earned a BA from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Fred Smeijers
#70051
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Fred Smeijers is a Dutch type designer, researcher and writer. He was educated at the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem in the early 1980s. Smeijers is the creative director and co-founder of the typeface design and publishing company Type By. In 2019 Smeijers was appointed Professor in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in the UK.
Go to Profile#4458
Katia Ricciarelli
#80428
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Catiuscia Maria Stella Ricciarelli , known as Katia Ricciarelli , is an Italian soprano and actress. Biography Born in Rovigo, Veneto, to a very poor family, she struggled during her younger years. She studied at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, won several vocal competitions in 1968, and made her professional debut as Mimì in Puccini's La bohème in Mantua in 1969. She appeared as Leonora in Verdi's Il trovatore in Parma in 1970. In the following year, she won RAI's "Voci Verdiane" award. Between 1972 and 1975, engagements followed in the major European and American opera houses,...
Go to Profile#4459
Yannick Nézet-Séguin
#76618
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, CC is a Canadian conductor and pianist. He is currently music director of the Orchestre Métropolitain , the Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was also principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 2008 to 2018.
Go to Profile#4460
Randal Kleiser
#64604
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Randal Kleiser is an American film and television director, producer, screenwriter and actor, best known for directing the 1978 musical romantic-comedy film Grease. Biography John Randal Kleiser was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, the son of Harriet Kelly and Dr. John Raymond Kleiser. He has two brothers. Kleiser attended Radnor High School.
Go to Profile#4461
Anne Balsamo
#33814
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Anne Marie Balsamo is a scholar whose career encompasses contributions as a theorist, designer, educator, and entrepreneur in the fields of feminist technology studies, media studies, design research, public interactives, cultural heritage, and media archeology.
Go to Profile#4462
Enzo G. Castellari
#81025
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Enzo Girolami Castellari is an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor. Early life Castellari was born in Rome into a family of filmmakers. His father was a boxer turned film maker Marino Girolami. His uncle is filmmaker Romolo Guerrieri and his brother was actor Ennio Girolami. He initially was a boxer like his father and went to school to get a degree in architecture.
Go to Profile#4463
Zhou Youguang
#74245
Overall Influence
1906 - 2017 (111 years)
Zhou Youguang , also known as Chou Yu-kuang or Chou Yao-ping, was a Chinese economist, banker, linguist, sinologist, Esperantist, publisher, and supercentenarian, adored as the "father of Pinyin", a system for the writing of Mandarin Chinese in Roman script, or romanization, which was officially adopted by the government of the People's Republic of China in 1958, the International Organization for Standardization in 1982, and the United Nations in 1986.
Go to Profile#4464
Neil Armfield
#68070
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Neil Geoffrey Armfield is an Australian director of theatre, film and opera. Biography Born in Sydney, Armfield is the third and youngest son of Len, a factory worker at the nearby Arnott's Biscuits factory and Nita Armfield. He was brought up in the suburb of Concord, adjacent to Exile Bay. He was educated at the Homebush Boys High School where, in 1972, he was the Vice-Captain. In that year, Armfield directed the school's production of Milne's "Toad of Toad Hall" which garnered him the award of "Best Director" at the NSW High Schools Drama Festival. When asked in 2019: “Who or what was yo...
Go to Profile#4465
Russell Scott Valentino
#78331
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Russell Scott Valentino is an American author, literary scholar, translator, and editor. Currently, he is a professor of Slavic and comparative literature, and serves as chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Tony Dow
#88504
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Anthony Lee Dow was an American actor, film producer, director and sculptor. He portrayed Wally Cleaver in the iconic television sitcom Leave It to Beaver from 1957 to 1963. From 1983 to 1989, Dow reprised his role as Wally in a television movie and in The New Leave It to Beaver.
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Kenny Barron
#76044
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Kenny Barron is an American jazz pianist, who has appeared on hundreds of recordings as leader and sideman and is considered one of the most influential mainstream jazz pianists since the bebop era.
Go to Profile#4468
Kinji Fukasaku
#62262
Overall Influence
1930 - 2003 (73 years)
Kinji Fukasaku was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. Known for his "broad range and innovative filmmaking," Fukasaku worked in many different genres and styles, but was best known for his gritty yakuza films, typified by the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series . According to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, "his turbulent energy and at times extreme violence express a cynical critique of social conditions and genuine sympathy for those left out of Japan's postwar prosperity." He used a cinema verite-inspired shaky camera technique in many of his films from the e...
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Melvin Franklin
#52434
Overall Influence
1942 - 1995 (53 years)
David Melvin English better known by the stage name Melvin Franklin or his nickname "Blue", was an American bass singer. Franklin was best known for his role as a founding member of Motown singing group The Temptations from 1960 to 1995.
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Mohammad Rawas
#42408
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mohammad Rawas or Mohammad El Rawas is a Lebanese painter and printmaker. He studied arts at the Lebanese University, then moved to London and studied Printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art. He currently lives and works in Beirut, where he taught at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut.
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Monika Bednarek
#115701
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Monika Bednarek is a German-born Australian linguist. She is a professor in linguistics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. She is one of the co-developers of Discursive News Values Analysis , which is a framework for analyzing how events are constructed as newsworthy through language and images. Her work ranges across various linguistic sub-disciplines, including corpus linguistics, media linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and applied linguistics.
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Rehema Ellis
#48632
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Rehema Ellis is an Americann television journalist, working for NBC News. A correspondent based in New York City, New York, she is also the lead education correspondent for NBC News. Early life and education Ellis was born in North Carolina, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#4473
Zuzanna Topolińska
#72516
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Zuzanna Topolińska - Polish linguist, Slavist, Macedonist. Biography Zuzanna Topolińska was born in Warsaw into an intellectual family. Her father was a historian, before the war he worked as a program director at Polish Radio. She passed her high school diploma in 1948 at the Gymnasium of Królowej Jadwigi in Kielce.
Go to Profile#4474
Kira Muratova
#62095
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Kira Georgievna Muratova was a Ukrainian award-winning film director, screenwriter and actress of Russian/Jewish descent, known for her unusual directorial style. Muratova's films underwent a great deal of censorship in the Soviet Union, yet still Muratova managed to emerge as one of the leading figures in contemporary Cinema of Ukraine and Russian cinema and was able to build a very successful film career from 1960s onwards. She is People's Artist of Ukraine; Academician of National Academy of Arts of Ukraine . Laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize ; Oleksandr Dovzhenko State Prize . Mu...
Go to Profile#4475
George Bear Graen
#115769
Overall Influence
#4476
James J. Jenkins
#115792
Overall Influence
#4477
Albert Hauf
#53227
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Albert Guillem Hauf i Valls is a Majorcan philologist, literature historian and literary critic. He is a specialist in Catalan and Occitan medieval literature. Life He graduated in romance Philology in the University of Barcelona, with a grant from the Joan March Foundation. His degree dissertation consisted of an edition of the Aragonese text of the Agriculture Treatise of Palladius Rutilius Emilianus. In the same university he obtained his PhD, which was supervised by professor Martí de Riquer, with a thesis on the Vita Christi, a work of the medieval Catalan writer Francesc Eiximenis, and the medieval tradition of the Vitae Christi.
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János Starker
#78191
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
János Starker was a Hungarian-American cellist. From 1958 until his death, he taught at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he held the title of Distinguished Professor. Starker is considered one of the greatest cellists of all time.
Go to Profile#4479
Prithviraj Sukumaran
#42583
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Prithviraj Sukumaran is an Indian actor, director, producer and playback singer primarily working in Malayalam language films. He has also done Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films. He acted in more than 100 films in a variety of roles and has received several awards including a National Film Award, three Kerala State Film Awards, a Tamil Nadu State Film Award and a South Filmfare Award.
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Brandi Carlile
#32668
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Brandi Marie Carlile is an American singer-songwriter. Her music spans many genres, including folk rock, alternative country, Americana, and classic rock. Born in Ravensdale, Washington, a rural town southeast of Seattle, Carlile dropped out of high school to pursue a career in music. , Carlile has released seven studio albums. Her debut major label album, Brandi Carlile , was released to critical acclaim. Carlile garnered wider recognition with her 2007 single, "The Story", from her album of the same name. Carlile later released Give Up the Ghost , Bear Creek , The Firewatcher's Daughter , B...
Go to Profile#4481
Gaiutra Bahadur
#43324
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American writer. She is best known for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014. Early life Bahadur was born in New Amsterdam, East Berbice-Corentyne in rural Guyana and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old. She grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey and earned her bachelor's degree, with honors in English Literature, at Yale University and her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.
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Dwight Bentel
#76891
Overall Influence
1909 - 2012 (103 years)
Dwight Essler Bentel was an American journalist and professor. He has been called "the father of journalism" at San Jose State University. In 1934, he founded the Spartan Daily, the campus newspaper. In 1936, he founded the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, which has produced six Pulitzer Prize winners and thousands of journalists, and is one of the largest programs of its kind in the nation. The school renamed the building that houses the school "Dwight Bentel Hall" in 1982. Subsequently, the on campus advertising agency has been named Dwight, Bentel and Hall Communications.
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Richard Tee
#64287
Overall Influence
1943 - 1993 (50 years)
Richard Edward Tee was an American pianist, studio musician, singer and arranger, who had several hundred studio credits and played on such notable hits as "In Your Eyes", "Slip Slidin' Away", "Just the Two of Us", "I'll Be Sweeter Tomorrow ", "Crackerbox Palace", "Tell Her About It", "Don't Give Up" and many others.
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Frederick R. Karl
#91473
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Frederick Robert Karl was a literary biographer, best known for his work on Joseph Conrad, a literary critic, and an editor. He spent 25 years teaching at City College of New York and then followed with 18 years at New York University.
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René Gsell
#92313
Overall Influence
1921 - 2000 (79 years)
René Gsell was a French linguist and phonetician. Career Starting in 1955, when he was appointed at the University of Grenoble, Gsell undertook to develop its Institute of Phonetics into an internationally recognized laboratory.
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Aditya Chopra
#46814
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Aditya Chopra is an Indian filmmaker, film distributor, film producer, writer and studio executive. He is the current Chairman of India's multi-national film, media, and entertainment conglomerate Yash Raj Films . The films he has produced make him the highest grossing Indian film producer of all time.
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Ana Paula Höfling
#37198
Overall Influence
Ana Paula Höfling is an American dancer, dance scholar, academic, and capoeirista. Education and training Höfling began dancing as a child and trained in classical ballet at the Royal Academy of Dance. She has a bachelor of arts in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, a master of fine arts in dance from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a master of arts in dance and a PhD in Culture and Performance Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Guy Barker
#79446
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Guy Jeffrey Barker, is an English jazz trumpeter and composer. Early life Barker was born in Chiswick, London, the son of an actress and a stuntman. He started playing the trumpet at the age of twelve, and within a year had joined the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. At the age of 15 he was playing with the Crouch End Allstars along with Wally Fawkes and Bob Nadkarni.
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Albrecht Neubert
#33422
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Albrecht Gotthold Neubert was a German translation scholar and lecturer in English language. Together with Gert Jäger and Otto Kade he was a notable member of the Leipzig School. Memberships Saxon Academy of Sciences and HumanitiesEast German Academy of SciencesInstitute for Applied Linguistics, Kent State UniversityNew York Academy of SciencesInternational Association of Applied LinguisticsInternational Federation for Modern Languages and LiteraturesGesellschaft für Angewandte LinguistikDeutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft
Go to Profile#4490
Jules Feiffer
#46966
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American cartoonist and author, who was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.
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Dottie West
#47795
Overall Influence
1932 - 1991 (59 years)
Dottie West was an American country music singer and songwriter. Along with her friends and fellow recording artists Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, she is considered one of the genre's most influential and groundbreaking female artists. West's career started in the 1960s, with her top-10 hit "Here Comes My Baby Back Again", which won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1965, the first woman in country music to receive a Grammy.
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Masao Miyoshi
#50236
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
was a scholar of literature and culture and Hajime Mori Endowed Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Career Born in Tokyo, he graduated from the University of Tokyo, majoring in English, and earned a Fulbright Fellowship to gain advanced degrees at New York University. Specializing in Victorian literature, he first taught at the University of California Berkeley, where he started working on Japanese literature as well. Eventually moving to the University of California, San Diego, he increasingly focused his writings on the relations between Japa...
Go to Profile#4493
Jon Rubin
#66431
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jon Rubin is a contemporary artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Projects Fruit and Other Things Fruit and Other Things is a project created in collaboration with artist Lenka Clayton commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for the 2018 iteration of the Carnegie International. The project pulls from the specific context and history of the Carnegie International, which in its earliest years, selected artworks for its exhibitions from an international competition. From 1896 to 1931, artists submitted artworks to be considered for the exhibi...
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Aulis Sallinen
#70426
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Aulis Heikki Sallinen is a Finnish contemporary classical music composer. His music has been variously described as "remorselessly harsh", a "beautifully crafted amalgam of several 20th-century styles", and "neo-romantic". Sallinen studied at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included Joonas Kokkonen. He has had works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, and has also written seven operas, eight symphonies, concertos for violin, cello, flute, horn, and English horn, as well as several chamber works. He won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1978 for his opera Ratsumies .
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Willy Decker
#60994
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Willy Decker is a German theatre director, particularly known for his opera productions. He staged the world premieres of Hans Werner Henze's Pollicino , Antonio Bibalo's Macbeth , and Aribert Reimann's Das Schloss .
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Jonathan Green
#53978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jonathan Green is an English author and investigative journalist specialising in narrative non-fiction. He is the author of two books Murder in the High Himalaya and Sex Money Murder . Life and career Green grew up on the family pig farm at Glemsford, near Sudbury, Suffolk; when he was 14 the family sold the farm settling in Bury St Edmunds. He attended boarding school at St Joseph's College, Ipswich, until age 18, but was unhappy with his education there and vowed to become a journalist after he graduated. Years later he would return to school and in 2015 obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Cr...
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Joseph Volpe
#63067
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Joseph Volpe is an American opera manager and arts management consultant. He is noted for his long association with the Metropolitan Opera, in which he served as general manager from 1990 to 2006. In all, he spent 42 years working at the Met in various capacities, rising rapidly to managerial positions. Since February 2016, he has been executive director of the Sarasota Ballet.
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Ellis Evans
#82278
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
David Ellis Evans FBA was a Welsh scholar and academic. He was born in the Tywi Valley in Carmarthenshire and went to Llandeilo Grammar School. After studying at Jesus College, Oxford and receiving a doctorate from the University of Oxford, he lectured at the University of Wales, Swansea from 1957 to 1978, rising to become Professor. In 1978, he returned to Oxford University as Jesus Professor of Celtic and also became a Professorial Fellow of Jesus College. He was appointed as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983, having delivered the Academy's Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture in 1977, named in honour of the first Oxford Celtic Professor.
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Candi Staton
#63352
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Canzetta Maria "Candi" Staton is an American singer–songwriter, best known in the United States for her 1970 remake of Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man" and her 1976 disco chart-topper "Young Hearts Run Free". In Europe, Staton's biggest selling record is the anthemic "You Got the Love" from 1986, released in collaboration with the Source. Staton was inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame and is a four-time Grammy Award nominee.
Go to Profile#4500
Raja Sen
#50138
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Raja Sen is an Indian film and television director and the winner of three National Film Awards from Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He is the father of Rajorshi Sen. Career Raja Sen first received recognition with Subarnalata , a teleserial, he followed it up with Adarsha Hindu Hotel, Arogyo Niketan, few episodes of Desh Amaar Desh are some of the notables of the Bengali television arena.
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