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).
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#14051
Eleanor Layfield Davis
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Eleanor Layfield Davis , also called ELDA, was an American painter. She served on the Board of Trustees for Meredith College and both Meredith and Wake Forest University award art scholarships in her memory.
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Henryk Siemiradzki
1843 - 1902 (59 years)
Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki was a Polish painter. He spent most of his active creative life in Rome. Best remembered for his monumental academic art. He was particularly known for his depictions of scenes from the ancient Greek-Roman world and the New Testament, owned by many national galleries of Europe.
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Elaine de Kooning
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
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Ferdynand Ruszczyc
1870 - 1936 (66 years)
Ferdynand Ruszczyc was Polish painter, printmaker, and stage designer. He was a member of the aristocratic Ruszczyc de Lis family. Biography Born in the village of Bohdanów , Ruszczyc spent his childhood in Minsk. He graduated from gymnasium in Minsk in 1890 with a gold medal. Ruszczyc originally studied law at the University of St. Petersburg, but later switched majors and began taking painting classes at the Imperial Academy of Arts. He was a student of the famous Russian landscape painters Ivan Shishkin and Arkhip Kuindzhi. Ruszczyc travelled to the Crimea to paint seascapes, and later to the Baltic islands and Sweden to paint northern landscapes.
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Milton Avery
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Milton Clark Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband of artist Sally Michel Avery and the father of artist March Avery.
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Gino Severini
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco. He showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.
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James Sturgis Pray
1871 - 1929 (58 years)
James Sturgis Pray was an American educator. Pray was president of the American Society of Landscape Architects from 1914 to 1918 and held the post of chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University.
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Karl Ferdinand Sohn
1805 - 1867 (62 years)
Karl Ferdinand Sohn was a German painter of the Düsseldorf school of painting. Biography He was born in Berlin and started his studies at the age of eighteen under Wilhelm von Schadow, whom he followed to Düsseldorf. He focused on mythical and poetic subjects of a highly romantic character, and painted in the idealistic manner of the Düsseldorf school.
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Karl Hofer
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Karl Christian Ludwig Hofer or Carl Hofer was a German expressionist painter. He was director of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. One of the most prominent painters of expressionism, he never was a member of one of the expressionist painting groups, like "Die Brücke", but was influenced by their painters. His work was among those considered degenerate art by the Nazis, but after World War II he regained recognition as one of the leading German painters.
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Frederick McCubbin
1855 - 1917 (62 years)
Frederick McCubbin was an Australian artist, art teacher and prominent member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism. Born and raised in Melbourne, Victoria, McCubbin studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School under a number of artists, notably Eugene von Guerard and later George Folingsby. One of his former classmates, Tom Roberts, returned from art training in Europe in 1885, and that summer they established the Box Hill artists' camp, where they were joined by Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. These artists formed the nucleus of what bec...
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Morris Louis
1912 - 1962 (50 years)
Morris Louis Bernstein , known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
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Vittore Carpaccio
1465 - 1526 (61 years)
Vittore Carpaccio Carpaccio's works ranged from single pieces painted on canvas to altarpieces and large pictorial cycles. Several of the altarpieces, including St. Thomas Aquinas Enthroned , Presentation of Christ in the Temple , and Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand , were commissioned by churches in Venice, while the pieces following the year 1510 were primarily commissioned by individual patrons in Venice. One of his largest pictorial series, The Legend of Saint Ursula, was begun in 1490.
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Antonio da Correggio
1489 - 1534 (45 years)
Antonio Allegri da Correggio , usually known as just Correggio , was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the High Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the sixteenth century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Baroque art of the seventeenth century and the Rococo art of the eighteenth century. He is considered a master of chiaroscuro.
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Đuro Daničić
1825 - 1882 (57 years)
Đuro Daničić , born Đorđe Popović and also known as Đura Daničić , was a Serbiann philologist, translator, linguistic historian and lexicographer. He was a prolific scholar at the Belgrade Lyceum.
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David Burliuk
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
David Davidovich Burliuk was a Ukrainian poet, artist and publicist associated with the Futurist and Neo-Primitivist movements. Burliuk has been described as "the father of Russian Futurism." Biography
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Hans Hartung
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Hans Hartung was a German-French painter, known for his gestural abstract style. He was also a decorated World War II veteran of the Legion d'honneur. Life Hartung was born in Leipzig, Germany, into an artistic family. He developed an early appreciation of Rembrandt, German painters such as Lovis Corinth, and the Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde. In 1924, he enrolled in Leipzig University, where he studied philosophy and art history. He subsequently studied at the Fine Arts academy of Dresden, where he copied the paintings of the masters. The modern French and Spanish works he sa...
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David Park
1911 - 1960 (49 years)
David Park was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s. Biography David Park was born in Boston, the son of Mary Turner and Charles Edward Park. His father was a Unitarian minister. He attended the Loomis Chaffee school in Windsor Connecticut and was recognized for his early talent by the sculptor Evelyn Longman Batchelder, the headmaster's wife. He moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17, staying with his aunt Edith Park Truesdell who was an artist, so he could study at Otis Art Institute in 1928. A year later, he moved to Berkeley where he married Lydia Newell in 1930 and with whom he had two daughters, Natalie and Helen.
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Federico Zuccari
1539 - 1609 (70 years)
Federico Zuccaro, also known as Federico Zuccari , was an Italian Mannerist painter and architect, active both in Italy and abroad. Biography Zuccaro was born at Sant'Angelo in Vado, near Urbino . His documented career as a painter began in 1550, when he moved to Rome to work under Taddeo, his elder brother. He went on to complete decorations for Pius IV, and help complete the fresco decorations at the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. Between 1563 and 1565, he was active in Venice with the Grimani family of Santa Maria Formosa. During his Venetian period, he traveled alongside Palladio in Friuli. H...
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Lionel Harry Butler
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Lionel Butler FRHistS MA DPhil was an academic and Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London, from 1973 until his death in 1981. Education and war service Butler was educated at Dudley Boys Grammar School. From 1941-43 he did war service with the Royal Air Force . He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner obtaining First Class Honours in Modern History in 1945.
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Russell Drysdale
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Sir George Russell Drysdale , also known as Tass Drysdale, was an Australian artist. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Sofala in 1947, and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".
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John Varley
1778 - 1842 (64 years)
John Varley was an English watercolour painter and astrologer, and a close friend of William Blake. They collaborated in 1819–1820 on the book Visionary Heads, written by Varley and illustrated by Blake. He was the elder brother of a family of artists: Cornelius Varley, William Fleetwood Varley, and Elizabeth, who married the painter William Mulready.
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John Craig
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
John Douglas Craig was a Scottish classicist, who was Firth Professor of Latin at the University of Sheffield from 1930 to 1952. Life Craig was the son of Rev Robert Craig, minister in Ardentinny in Argyll, Scotland. He was the younger brother of Robert Meldrum Craig FRSE, the geologist, and Prof James Manson Craig of St Andrews University.
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Francesco Albani
1578 - 1660 (82 years)
Francesco Albani or Albano was an Italian Baroque painter who was active in Bologna , Rome , Bologna , Viterbo , Bologna , Rome , Bologna , Mantova , Roma and Florence . Early years in Bologna Albani was born in Bologna, Italy in 1578. His father was a silk merchant who intended his son to go into his own trade. By the age of twelve, however, he had become an apprentice to the competent mannerist painter Denis Calvaert, in whose studio he met Guido Reni. He soon followed Reni to the so-called "Academy" run by Annibale, Agostino, and Ludovico Carracci. This studio fostered the careers of many...
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Paul Sandby
1725 - 1809 (84 years)
Paul Sandby was an English map-maker turned landscape painter in watercolours, who, along with his older brother Thomas, became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Life and work
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Martin von Feuerstein
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Martin Feuerstein was a German painter and art teacher. He was a late adherent of the Nazarene movement, but was also heavily influenced by impressionism and Art Nouveau. Life His father, Johann Martin Feuerstein, was a sculptor. By 1870, he was studying in Munich. He moved to Paris in 1878 for further studies with Luc-Olivier Merson, then worked as a painter of genre scenes in Alsace from 1880 to 1882. The following year, he took a study trip to Italy. His experiences there inspired him to devote himself to religious art when he returned to Munich. From 1898 to 1924, he was the Professor of Religious Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts; the last person to hold that chair.
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Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro , who is usually referred to as Columbano, was a Portuguese Realist painter. Usually considered the greatest Portuguese painter of the 19th century, he has been compared to the likes of Wilhelm Leibl and John Singer Sargent.
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Leopold Müller
1834 - 1892 (58 years)
Leopold Carl Müller was an Austrian genre painter noted for his Orientalist works. Biography Born in Dresden to Austrian parents, he was a pupil of Karl von Blaas and of Christian Ruben at the Academy in Vienna. Obliged to support his family after his father's death, he worked eight years as an illustrator for the Vienna Figaro. Continuing his studies subsequently, he visited repeatedly Italy and Egypt, and made his name favorably known through a series of scenes from popular life in Italy and Hungary.
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Donald Forster
1934 - 1983 (49 years)
Donald Forster was a Canadian academic. He was president of the University of Guelph, and was appointed president of the University of Toronto just before his death. Born in Toronto, Ontario, he was a graduate of the University of Toronto and of Harvard University. Later, he was a professor of economics in the department of political economy at the University of Toronto. He was also a vice-president and provost. From 1975 to 1983, he was president of the University of Guelph.
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Cimabue
1240 - 1302 (62 years)
Cimabue , – 1302, was an Italian painter and designer of mosaics from Florence. He was also known as Cenni di Pepo or Cenni di Pepi. Although heavily influenced by Byzantine models, Cimabue is generally regarded as one of the first great Italian painters to break from the Italo-Byzantine style. While medieval art then was scenes and forms that appeared relatively flat and highly stylized, Cimabue's figures were depicted with more advanced lifelike proportions and shading than other artists of his time. According to Italian painter and historian Giorgio Vasari, Cimabue was the teacher of Giotto, the first great artist of the Italian Proto-Renaissance.
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John Linnell
1792 - 1882 (90 years)
John Linnell was an English engraver, and portrait and landscape painter. He was a naturalist and a rival to the artist John Constable. He had a taste for Northern European art of the Renaissance, particularly Albrecht Dürer. He also associated with the amateur artist Edward Thomas Daniell, and with William Blake, to whom he introduced the painter and writer Samuel Palmer and others of the Ancients.
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George Bridgman
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
George Brant Bridgman was a Canadian-American painter, writer, and teacher in the fields of anatomy and figure drawing. Bridgman taught anatomy for artists at the Art Students League of New York for some 45 years.
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John Gregory
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
John Clements Gregory was an American sculptor. Life When he was about 12 years old his family immigrated to the United States where he began his sculptural studies at the Art Students League in New York City. He continued these at both the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the American Academy in Rome. At various times he studied with J. Massey Rhind, George Grey Barnard, Hermon MacNeil, Gutzon Borglum, Herbert Adams, and Antonin Mercié. He became a United States citizen in 1912 and during the First World War served in the camouflage section of the U.S. Navy.
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William A. Finley
1839 - 1912 (73 years)
William Asa Finley was an American academic and the first president of Corvallis College, known today as Oregon State University. Born in Missouri in 1839, Finley moved to California in 1852. He went to California Wesleyan College in Santa Clara for three years and Pacific Methodist College for one year, where he received the degree of Artium Magister. Thereafter, he received the honorary Doctor of Divinity from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1871.
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Max Robinson
1939 - 1988 (49 years)
Maxie Cleveland Robinson Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, most notably serving as co-anchor on ABC World News Tonight alongside Frank Reynolds and Peter Jennings from 1978 until 1983. Robinson is noted as the first African-American broadcast network news anchor in the United States. Robinson was a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists.
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Sebastiano del Piombo
1485 - 1547 (62 years)
Sebastiano del Piombo was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance and early Mannerist periods famous as the only major artist of the period to combine the colouring of the Venetian school in which he was trained with the monumental forms of the Roman school. He belongs both to the painting school of his native city, Venice, where he made significant contributions before he left for Rome in 1511, and that of Rome, where he stayed for the rest of his life, and whose style he thoroughly adopted.
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Antonello da Messina
1430 - 1479 (49 years)
Antonello da Messina , properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio, but also called Antonello degli Antoni and Anglicized as Anthony of Messina, was an Italian painter from Messina, active during the Italian Early Renaissance.
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Pietro Lorenzetti
1280 - 1348 (68 years)
Pietro Lorenzetti or Pietro Laurati was an Italian painter, active between and 1345. Together with his younger brother Ambrogio, he introduced naturalism into Sienese art. In their artistry and experiments with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements, the brothers foreshadowed the art of the Renaissance.
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Morris Ankrum
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Morris Ankrum was an American radio, television, and film character actor. Early life Born in Danville in Vermilion County in eastern Illinois, Ankrum originally began a career in academics. After graduating from The University of Southern California with a law degree, he went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley he became involved in the drama department and eventually began teaching drama and directing at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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Karl E. Young
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Karl Egbert Young was a professor of English and related subjects at Brigham Young University who wrote several books, primarily dealing with the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico and the flight of these colonists back to the United States in 1912.
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Aleš Ušeničnik
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Aleš Ušeničnik was a Slovene Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, sociologist and theologian. He was one of the main philosophers of neo-Thomism in Slovenia and in Yugoslavia. Ušeničnik was born in the village of Poljane near the Upper Carniolan town of Škofja Loka, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire . He studied theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In 1897, he became a professor at the Theological Seminary in Ljubljana. In 1919, he became a professor at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Ljubljana, where he taught philosophy. In 1922 and 1923, he served as the fourth chancellor of the University of Ljubljana.
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John Reith, 1st Baron Reith
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
John Charles Walsham Reith, 1st Baron Reith, , was a British broadcasting executive who established the tradition of independent public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. In 1922, he was employed by the BBC, then the British Broadcasting Company Ltd., as its general manager; in 1923 he became its managing director, and in 1927 he was employed as the Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation created under a royal charter. His concept of broadcasting as a way of educating the masses marked for a long time the BBC and similar organisations around the world. An engineer by...
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Leonard D. Jungwirth
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
Leonard D. Jungwirth American sculptor born in Detroit, Michigan. He studied with his father Joachim Jungwirth, a Detroit wood carver. His formal education was furthered at the School of Fine Arts and Wayne State University both in Detroit. He spent 1929 through 1933 studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany.
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Suzanne Scheuer
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Suzanne Scheuer was an American fine artist, best known for her New Deal-era murals. She painted one of the murals in Coit Tower, Newsgathering. Biography Suzanne Scheuer was born in San Jose, California on February 11, 1898. Scheuer was of Dutch descent.
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Gregory Ivy
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Gregory Ivy was chairman of the art department at Woman's College, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from 1935 to 1961. He was born on May 7, 1904, in Clarksburg Missouri, to Bennet Monroe Ivy and Fanni B. Dowler.
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Frank Duveneck
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Frank Duveneck was an American figure and portrait painter. Early life Duveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, the son of German immigrant Bernhard Decker. Decker died in a cholera epidemic when Frank was only a year old, and his widow remarried Joseph "Squire" Duveneck. By the age of 15, Frank had begun the study of art under the tutelage of a local painter, Johann Schmitt, and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators.
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John Glover
1767 - 1849 (82 years)
John Glover was an English-born artist. In later life he migrated to Van Diemen’s Land and became a pastoralist during the early colonial period. He has been dubbed "the father of Australian landscape painting."
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Adam Kossowski
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Adam Kossowski was a Polish artist, born in Nowy Sącz, notable for his works for the Catholic Church in England, where he arrived in 1943 as a refugee from Soviet labour camps and was invited in 1944 to join the Guild of Catholic Artists and Craftsmen.
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John Heartfield
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
John Heartfield was a 20th-century German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. Heartfield also created book jackets for book authors, such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for contemporary playwrights, such as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.
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John Calvin Stevens
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
John Calvin Stevens was an American architect who worked in the Shingle Style, in which he was a major innovator, and the Colonial Revival style. He designed more than 1,000 buildings in the state of Maine.
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Lew Landers
1901 - 1962 (61 years)
Lew Landers was an American independent film and television director. Biography Born as Louis Friedlander in New York City, Lew Landers began his movie career as an actor. In 1914, he appeared in two features: D.W. Griffith's drama The Escape and the comedy short Admission – Two Pins, under his birth name. He became an assistant director at Universal Pictures in 1922. He began making films in the 1930s, one of his early ones being the Boris Karloff / Bela Lugosi thriller The Raven . After directing a few more features, he changed his name to Lew Landers and directed more than 100 films in a variety of genres, including Westerns, comedies, and horror movies.
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