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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ROSE BYRNE
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JULIANNE MOORE
Raven Leilani
Photography by Raven Leilani

Raven Leilani

Writer

WHAT IS YOUR CALLING CARD?

Yellow. Humidity. Very long voice notes. Making dinner plans in winter for the spring.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?

I’m a person who is ready to believe. Skepticism didn’t come naturally to me. I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist. You keep the sabbath, you eat a specific diet, you spend a lot of time in communion with God. When I became an atheist, I retained that desire for belief and ritual. I still go earnestly into most things. It can be vulnerable, embarrassing, and incline you toward people and experiences that are essentially surrogate cults, but every now and then you find a true, god-like thing.

“I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist. When I became an atheist, I retained that desire for belief and ritual. I still go earnestly into most things.”

DESCRIBE A RECENT CROSSROADS AT WHICH YOU FOUND YOURSELF.

Recognizing when I’ve outgrown an artistic routine. For me, there is comfort in the rhythms that develop around a project, but I’ve found those rhythms to be specific to the subject. Now, I let the subject dictate the process, and stuckness feels less like a crisis and more like meaningful discomfort with how the work has changed.

WHAT’S ONE BOOK, WORK OF ART, ALBUM, OR FILM THAT GOT YOU THROUGH AN IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE?

Kool & the Gang’s “Summer Madness” has gotten me through many moments. Everything I’ve ever written has been written to it. I play it every time I fly, every time I am behind the wheel of a U-Haul, when I am in deep winter and very depressed. For years, I have been collecting covers and songs that have sampled it. It embodies the season so utterly, and it’s what I reach for when I need warmth.

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ROSE BYRNE
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JULIANNE MOORE