Publishing is full of rankings, from power lists to best-dressed lists to under-40 lists. The CULT100 is different. There is just one criterion for inclusion—but it’s a high bar.

To qualify, a candidate must be actively shaping and changing our culture in real time. The people on this list represent five generations and hail from the worlds of food, publishing, art, fashion, activism, and entertainment. To put this group together, CULTURED‘s editors leveraged the full strength of our network, tapping artists, writers, and cultural leaders to tell us who they look to when they want to feel challenged, hopeful, and inspired.

Some members of the CULT100 are household names; others have been working behind the scenes to make possible the cultural encounters that stop us in our tracks. In a time of binary thinking, the creators featured in this year’s list are embracing contradiction, bouncing willfully between disciplines, and refusing to take no for an answer. They have guts, vision, and a potent cocktail of realism and optimism. None of them is shying away from the anxiety of our moment. Instead, they are thinking big, sharing generously, and embodying courage. The good news is, their work makes us all a little bit braver, too.

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MICHAEL GOVAN
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SHOHEI SHIGEMATSU
IAN STEARNS
Photography by IAN STEARNS

JAMIE HOOD

WRITER

Following the release of 2020’s How to Be a Good Girl and her ongoing, Proust-infused newsletter, regards, marcel, the endlessly experimental writer is back with Trauma Plot, a lesson in the art of the post-#MeToo memoir.

WHAT’S ONE BOOK, WORK OF ART, OR FILM THAT GOT YOU THROUGH AN IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE? Oh god, so many—art is why I’m still here. When I was younger, it was usually music: Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love, Joanna Newsom’s Ys. Nina Simone and Patsy Cline, of course. The films of Catherine Breillat and Jane Campion—also Twin Peaks—gave a texture to my grief and my boundless desire. And, yes, books: the poems of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the novels of Shirley Hazzard. It’s devastating to watch people look to A.I. slop as a possible future for art, which it can and will never be.

WHO DO YOU CALL THE MOST? My two best friends and I are in a group chat we’ve named “Low Engagement, High Breasts,” and it functions—by virtue of a shared, insatiable desire to send voice notes to one another—like a kind of 24/7 phone call. We talk about everything in our lives—our pleasures, our terrors, our yearnings; we send memes and tweets; we gossip about men; and we workshop our writing (between summer 2024 and spring 2025, all three of us published new books). The rhythm of my days can be charted by our chatter. The happiness they bring to my life is immeasurable.

"It’s devastating to watch people look to A.I. slop as a possible future for art, which it can and will never be."

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE LESS OF IN YOUR INDUSTRY? Cynicism. Paranoid reading. Venture capital.

WHAT’S SOMETHING PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT YOU? People always tell me they’re intimidated by me, but I wish they’d understand it’s mostly that I’m sort of shy with new people and in new spaces. Plus, I have a forehead full of Botox. It gives me a rather imperious look.

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MICHAEL GOVAN
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SHOHEI SHIGEMATSU