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 Computer Science,
#2101
Conny Restle
#100149
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Conny Restle is a German musicologist, Museum director and lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts. Life Born in Munich, Restle took her Abitur at the humanistic Wilhelmsgymnasium in 1980. From 1980 to 1985 she studied Musicology, Latin philology of the Middle Ages and German Philology of the same period at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. After graduating with a Magister Artium, she worked at the Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte from 1986 to 1989. In 1989 Restle received her doctorate in musicology with a thesis on Bartolomeo Cristofori and the beginnings of the ...
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Christine Gardner
#66044
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Christine Joy Gardner is an American communication scholar and journalist. She is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Communication Arts at Gordon College. Early life and education Gardner was born in 1969. She has received degrees from Seattle Pacific University , the University of Washington , and Northwestern University .
Go to Profile#2103
Kathy Goodell
#160838
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Kathy Goodell is an American contemporary artist based in New York City. She works in sculptural objects, installation, drawing and photography. She is a professor of painting and drawing at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Go to Profile#2104
Sophia Wisniewska
#179366
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Sophia Wisniewska is a university administrator and a former chancellor of University of South Florida St. Petersburg and Pennsylvania State Brandywine. Earlier in her career, she worked for her alma mater, Pennsylvania State University, and later served as the dean of Temple University Ambler.
Go to Profile#2105
Jean Dollimore
#192394
Overall Influence
Jean Dollimore is an English computer scientist that worked at Queen Mary University of London, notable for being co-author of one of the standard distributed computer systems textbooks, Distributed Systems . This textbook alone has been cited over 4,700 times.
Go to Profile#2106
Margaret Boozer
#107380
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Margaret A Boozer is an American ceramist and sculpture artist, best known for her clay and ceramic compositions, or landscapes, that focus on the individuality, history, and geology of the clay used as subject matters.
Go to Profile#2107
Mandy Martin
#87868
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Mandy Martin was a contemporary Australian painter, printmaker and teacher. She was involved in the development of feminist art in Australia from the mid-1970s and as exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. In recent years she used the art she created as part of the ongoing debate on climate change, an area in which she was "prolifically active". Based in Canberra for many years, she was also a lecturer at the Australian National University School of Art from 1978 to 2003. As well as being a visual artist, Martin was an adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Soc...
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Cho Yoon-kyoung
#190023
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Cho Yoon-Kyoung is an interdisciplinary researcher involved in basic science to translational research in microfluidics and nanomedicine. She is a group leader in the Center for Soft and Living Matter at the Institute for Basic Science and a full professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology , Ulsan, Korea. Cho is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Go to Profile#2109
Hermine Freed
#168160
Overall Influence
1940 - 1998 (58 years)
Hermine Freed , was an American painter, photographer, and video artist. She is noted for being among the first generation of artists to explore video art in the late 1960s. Life and work Freed studied painting at Cornell University and New York University, where she taught starting from the late 1960s. In 1972 she became a professor for video art at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
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Orshi Drozdik
#31724
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Orshi Drozdik is a feminist visual artist based in New York City. Her work consists of drawings, paintings, photographs, etchings, performances, videos, sculptures, installations, academic writings and fiction, that explore connected themes, sometimes over an extended period. Through her work, organized into several topics, she explores themes that undermine the traditional and erotic representation of women: Individual Mythologies, Adventure in Tecnos Dystopium, and Manufacturing the Self. She is influenced by Valéria Dienes, János Zsilka, Susan Sontag, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Luce Irigaray, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, among others.
Go to Profile#2111
Elena Kovalskaya
#184272
Overall Influence
Elena Kovalskaya is a Russian theatre critic, curator, and teacher. She teaches the history of foreign theatre at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts , and directs a master's program there in social theatre. Until she resigned in protest at the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, she was artistic director at the Meyerhold Theatre and Cultural Center .
Go to Profile#2112
Helen Mirra
#171050
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Hendl Helen Mirra is an American conceptual artist. "[Like Henry David Thoreau, she is a] maximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice. She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist and pragmatist philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking. She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity, and a free activity, and an always-available activity, and an equipment-free activity, and an active activity." In an essay on Mirra's work, Yukio Lippit described her engagement thus: "Mirra’s practice champions walking as a specific form of thinking that bypasses language.
Go to Profile#2113
Sonya Sklaroff
#114043
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Biography Sonya Sklaroff, born on November 7, 1970, in Philadelphia, is a contemporary American painter renowned for her cityscapes of New York City. Her educational journey began at Friends' Central School and led her to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design , where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts. At RISD, she won the Providence Art Award and was selected for the European Honors Program, studying under Friedrich St. Florian. Sklaroff later achieved her Master of Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she studied under luminaries such as Faith Ringgold and Glenn Goldberg.
Go to Profile#2114
Susie Ganch
#190752
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Susie Ganch is a first generation American artist of Hungarian heritage. She is a sculptor, jeweler, educator, and founder and director of Radical Jewelry Makeover. Ganch received her Bachelors in Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Geology in 1994 and her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997.
Go to Profile#2115
Afaf Zurayk
#111055
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Afaf Zurayk is a Lebanese multimedia artist and poet living and working in Beirut, Lebanon. Education and teaching Born in Beirut, Afaf Zurayk graduated from the American University of Beirut in 1970 with a BA in fine arts with distinction, and obtained an MA in Islamic art from Harvard University in 1972. She taught in Lebanon at the Beirut University College and the American University of Beirut, as well as in the continuing education programs of the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
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Wanda Ewing
#173298
Overall Influence
1970 - 2013 (43 years)
Wanda Ewing was an artist born in Omaha, Nebraska. She considered her art to be "provocative with a political edge." A common message of her art was “I’m a proud black woman, and I’m going to be hard to ignore.” Ewing studied printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute where she received her BFA in 1997. She received her MA and MFA in printmaking at the University of Iowa in 2001 and 2002, respectively. She was a tenured professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she taught visual arts classes from 2004 to 2013. Ewing exhibited nationally and won several awards for her work.
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Gail Wight
#117139
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Gail Wight is an American new media artist and professor, whose work fuses art with biology, neurology, and technology. Popular media Wight uses to create art include, drawing and painting, electronic sculpture, interactive sculpture, video and living mediums. Since 2003, Wight has taught at Stanford University in the Department of Art.
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Emily R Mikeska
#192431
Overall Influence
#2119
Allison Smith
#168579
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Allison Smith is an American artist who is based in Oakland, California. Smith's work draws from American history to create artworks which combine social practice, performance, and craft-based sculpture.
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Julie Freeman
#142537
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Julie Freeman is an artist whose work spans visual, audio and digital art forms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it. Biography Freeman's work has focused on using electronic technologies to ‘translate nature’ – whether it is through the sound of torrential rain dripping on a giant rhubarb leaf, a pair of mobile concrete speakers who lurk in galleries haranguing passersby with fractured sonic samples, or by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch and prick of dogs' ears.
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Maggie Michael
#181893
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Maggie Michael is an American painter. Born in Milwaukee, Michael has spent much of her career in Washington, D.C. A 1996 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which she received a BFA, with honors, she received her MA from San Francisco State University in 2000 and her MFA from American University in 2002. She has received numerous awards during her career, including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004, the same year in which she was given a Young Artist Grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; she has also worked with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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Cherine Fahd
#187806
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Cherine Fahd is an Australian artist who works in photography and video performance. She is also Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and has published in academic journals, photographic and art publications, and in news and media. Her work has been shown in Australia, Israel, Greece and Japan. She has received numerous grants, and has been awarded residencies in India and in Sydney at the Carriageworks.
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Gesche Würfel
#188438
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Gesche Würfel is a visual artist born in Bremerhaven, Germany, and based in the United States since 2009. Her practice mostly focuses on photography, but also includes video, sound, installation, and urban interventions.
Go to Profile#2124
Hannah Rickards
#115176
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Hannah Rickards is a British artist. She has won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Visual and Performing Arts. Life and work Rickards was born in London. She studied at Central Saint Martins and now teaches there.
Go to Profile#2125
Sheida Soleimani
#122060
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
Sheida Soleimani is an Iranian-American multimedia artist, activist, and professor. Her works have generated conversations in the field of 'constructed' tableau photography, as well as the intersections of art and protest, with a focus on Iranian human-rights violations.
Go to Profile#2126
Kate Greenaway
1846 - 1901 (55 years)
Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evan...
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Mary Cassatt
1844 - 1926 (82 years)
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania , but lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
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Rosa Bonheur
1822 - 1899 (77 years)
Rosa Bonheur was a French artist known best as a painter of animals . She also made sculptures in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair , which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
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Gertrude Jekyll
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Gertrude Jekyll was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden. Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by British and American gardening enthusiasts.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer. Born in 1889 in Davos, and raised in Trogen, Switzerland, she attended a trade school in St. Gallen and, later, art schools in Germany, before moving back to Switzerland during the First World War. At an exhibition in 1915, she met for the first time the German-French artist Hans/Jean Arp, whom she married shortly after. It was during these years that they became associated with the Dada movement, which emerged in 1916, and Taeuber-Arp's most famous works – Dada Head – date from these years.
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Laura H. Carnell
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Laura Horner Carnell was an American educator and the first dean of Temple University. Formative years Born in Philadelphia on September 7, 1867, Carnell graduated from the Philadelphia Normal School in 1866. In 1895, she was asked by Temple University founder Russell Conwell to join Temple's faculty. During her tenure, she helped found the Women's Department, and was named acting dean in 1897. In 1905, she was named dean, and served in that post until 1925; she then became associate president. Carnell was also named to the Philadelphia Board of Public Education in 1923. In 1924 she was presi...
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Tamara de Lempicka
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Tamara Łempicka , better known as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes.
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Ana Mendieta
1948 - 1985 (37 years)
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. She is considered one of the most influential Cuban-American artists of the post-World War II era. Born in Havana, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.
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Hertha Ayrton
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water.
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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
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Theresa Pollak
1899 - 2002 (103 years)
Theresa Pollak was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter, and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002 and was given a memorial exhibition at Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Shirley Carew Titus
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Shirley Carew Titus was a nurse educator at the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Titus was the executive director of the California Nurses' Association from 1942 until 1956. She successfully advocated for and achieved the first collective bargaining for nurses. In 1982, Titus was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She died on March 21, 1967. She was survived by her sister, Adele B. Titus.
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Sibyl M. Rock
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrome...
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Sofonisba Anguissola
1535 - 1625 (90 years)
Sofonisba Anguissola , also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.
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Kathleen Allen
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Kathleen Saywell Allen was a British painter, muralist, designer and art teacher. Allen is known for her urban landscapes and, in particular, scenes depicting post-war rebuilding in London. Biography Allen was born in the Chiswick area of London and, due to a prolonged childhood illness, was home-schooled until she was 14 years old, when she attended Bromley Country School for Girls between 1920 and 1924. Eventually she enrolled in the Royal College of Art. Upon graduating from the RCA in 1928, Allen taught art in a number of schools in London and the Midlands before spending time painting murals in Kent and Warwickshire.
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Anna Morandi Manzolini
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Anna Morandi Manzolini was an internationally known anatomist and anatomical wax modeler, as lecturer of anatomical design at the University of Bologna. Life Morandi was born in 1714 in Bologna, Italy. She was raised in a traditional home where marriage, children, and a domestic lifestyle were natural choices for women. Women were expected to be wives, raise their children and essentially tend to their husbands needs and wants. This wasn’t the case for Anna Morandi. She became a wife and had children, but instead of tending to her husband, she worked side by side with him. In 1736, Morandi ma...
Go to Profile#2142
Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876 - 1907 (31 years)
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. She is noted for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. She is considered one of the most important representatives of early expressionism, producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings during her active painting life. She is recognized both as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art . Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict her...
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Matilda Ellen Bishop
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Matilda Ellen Bishop was the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London and was responsible for establishing many of the early traditions at the institution. Her father was a scholarly Church of England clergyman.
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Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
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Margaret Garland
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Margaret Vallis Mary Lester Garland was a British artist known as a painter of landscapes and figure subjects. Biography Garland was born in Oxford and attended the Royal College of Art design school between 1925 and 1927. There she met Helen Binyon and they became lifelong friends. After graduating from the Royal College she began to exhibit with the New English Art Club and also received a commission to create a mural for the Holy Trinity Church in Bath. The mural was completed but destroyed by bombing during World War II. After the War, Garland remained in Bath where she taught at the Bat...
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Elizabeth Gould
1804 - 1841 (37 years)
Elizabeth Gould, née Coxen , was a British artist and illustrator at the forefront of the natural history movement. Elizabeth traveled and worked alongside her husband, naturalist and author John Gould. She produced illustrations and lithographs for ornithological works, including plates in Darwin's The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle and the Goulds' seminal work The Birds of Australia. In total, Elizabeth is accredited to at least 650 works.
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Lygia Clark
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Lygia Pimentel Lins , better known as Lygia Clark, was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement. Along with Brazilian artists Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Pape and poet Ferreira Gullar, Clark co-founded the Neo-Concrete movement. From 1960 on, Clark discovered ways for viewers to interact with her art works. Clark's work dealt with the relationship between inside and outside, and, ultimately, between self and world.
Go to Profile#2148
Olea Marion Davis
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Olea Marion Davis was a Canadian artist and craftsperson who worked in architecture and decorative art as well as sculpture and pottery. Her sculptural and ceramic work was exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, as well as at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 and the Ostende International Show in 1959. Her architectural commissions include friezes, ornamental grills and screens, and lighting fixtures for locations such as the Hotel Vancouver and Pier B.C. in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
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Sarah A. Worden
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Sarah A. Worden was an American painter of landscapes and portraits. She was also an art instructor in various schools and for several years, at Mount Holyoke College. Early life and education Sarah Agnes Worden was born in Xenia, Ohio, October 10, 1853.
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Wenonah Bell
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Wenonah Day Bell was an American painter known for depictions of rural life in the southern United States and urban scenes of New York. Bell was a native of Trenton, South Carolina, and the daughter of a Baptist minister. The Bell family lived in numerous small towns throughout the Piedmont region during Bell's childhood. They eventually settling in Gainesville, Georgia, where her father established a ministry.
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