Ariele Alasko is a designer and woodworker from New York City. [1] [2] Her early work consists of furniture and art from re-purposed wood arranged in patterns. She gained popularity on Instagram with a curated feed of cutting boards, handmade spoons, her Brooklyn studio, and her dog. [3] [4]
In 2015, Alasko had 370,000 followers on Instagram, and by 2016, it was 418,000 followers. [4] [5] She achieved notoriety for her carved wooden spoons and sculptures which were sold at a high price and were copied by other artists. [6] [4] [7] [5]
In 2018, she began making stout, squiggly, table brushes with wood and tampico fibers that sold out immediately on her web store. [3] [8]
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Judith Scott was an American fiber sculptor. She was deaf and had Down Syndrome. She was internationally renowned for her art. In 1987, Judith was enrolled at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, which supports people with developmental disabilities. There, Judith discovered her passion and talent for abstract fiber art, and she was able to communicate in a new form. An account of Scott's life, Entwined: Sisters and Secrets in the Silent World of Artist Judith Scott, was written by her twin sister, Joyce Wallace Scott, and was published in 2016.
Taryn Southern is an American storyteller, artist, speaker and brand strategist who works with emerging technologies. She was formerly known for her work as a TV host, actress and YouTuber.
Kelly Wearstler is an American designer. She founded her own design firm Kelly Wearstler Interior Design in the mid-1990s, serving mainly the hotel industry, and now designs across high-end residential, commercial, retail and hospitality spaces. Her designs for the Viceroy hotel chain in the early 2000s have been noted for their influence on the design industry. She has designed properties for clients such as Gwen Stefani, Cameron Diaz and Stacey Snider, and served as a judge on all episodes of Bravo's Top Design reality contest in 2007 and 2008.
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field. Influencers are someone with the power to affect the buying habits or quantifiable actions of others by uploading some form of original—often sponsored—content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok or other online channels. Influencer marketing is when a brand enrolls influencers who have an established credibility and audience on social media platforms to discuss or mention the brand in a social media post. Influencer content may be framed as testimonial advertising.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Evelyn Alexandra Lozada is an American television personality, model, and spokesperson. Lozada is best known as one of the six main cast members in the VH1 reality series Basketball Wives throughout its run beginning in 2010.
Aimee Rachel Osbourne is an English actress and singer. She is the eldest daughter of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. Her father Ozzy also has two older children from his previous 11-year marriage to his first wife Thelma Riley, one of whom is adopted. Aimee is Ozzy's second daughter, the oldest being half-sister Jessica. While her younger siblings Jack and Kelly achieved pop culture fame for appearing in the family's MTV reality series The Osbournes, Aimee declined to appear on the show, feeling that doing so would typecast her and affect her musical career. She has expressed discomfort with some of her parents' behaviour on television.
Naomi Hirahara is an American writer and journalist. She edited the largest Japanese-American daily newspaper, Rafu Shimpo for several years. She is currently a writer of both fiction and non-fiction works and the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai mystery series.
Jessica B. Harris is an American culinary historian, college professor, cookbook author and journalist. She is professor emerita at Queens College, City University of New York, where she taught for 50 years, and is also the author of 15 books, including cookbooks, non-fiction food writing and memoir. She has twice won James Beard Foundation Awards, including for Lifetime Achievement in 2020, and her book High on the Hog was adapted in 2021 as a four-part Netflix series by the same name.
Jenna Weiss-Berman is a podcast producer and co-founder of Pineapple Street Media. Formerly she was director of audio for BuzzFeed.
Kimberly Drew is an American art influencer and writer. She is best known as the former social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her use of the social media handle MuseumMammy. Drew released her first book, This Is What I Know About Art in June 2020, as part of a children series from Penguin, and published an anthology titled Black Futures with New York Times staff writer Jenna Wortham in December 2020.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Grace Bonney is an American author, blogger, and entrepreneur. Bonney is best known for founding the interior design blog Design*Sponge, which published for 15 years. Bonney wrote The New York Times bestseller, In The Company of Women, a book featuring more than 100 stories about women entrepreneurs who overcame adversity. Bonney is also the author of the DIY interior design book Design*Sponge at Home.
Jessamyn Stanley is an American yoga teacher and body positivity advocate and writer. She gained recognition through her Instagram posts showing her doing yoga as a "plus-size woman of color," who self-identifies as a "fat femme" and "queer femme." She is the author of the books Every Body Yoga: Let Go of Fear, Get On the Mat, Love Your Body and Yoke: My Yoga of Self Acceptance.
Hannah Shaw is an animal welfare advocate and internet celebrity, known for being an educator on kittens.
Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."
Hussain Almossawi is a Product Designer, CGI Artist, and bestselling author of The Innovator's Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing Your Creative Mindset, based in New York City.
Rosamond S. King is an American poet and literary theorist. She is a literature professor at Brooklyn College, where her courses focus on Caribbean and African literature, sexuality, and performance. In 2017, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for her debut poetry collection, Rock | Salt | Stone.