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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Maia Wyman
Photography by Maia Wyman

Rayne Fisher-Quann

WRITER

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?

My Twitter bio is “girl with no needs,” which is a joke, because really I might describe myself as the girl with the most needs ever. But I am also a girl who desperately wishes she had no needs. Therapists have described this as “very interesting” and “let’s circle back to that.”

"My Twitter bio is 'girl with no needs,' which is a joke, because really I might describe myself as the girl with the most needs ever."

NAME AN INFLUENCE OF YOURS THAT MIGHT SURPRISE PEOPLE.

My biggest influences are Kurt Vonnegut and the Christian mystic Margery Kempe. I have always loved the way Kurt wrote. I can’t read him too much while I’m writing or I start cribbing his style. Breakfast of Champions was my first real favorite book—I read it for the first time when I was maybe 13—and there’s a part in the beginning where he says, “I can’t live without a culture anymore.” I remember it just hit me like a ton of bricks. It sounds sort of silly and pretentious, and of course it’s a very 13-year-old realization, but it felt like I had been told some religious secret—I was like, Woah, there’s this thing called culture, and it matters more than almost anything else in the world.

WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE, WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN FOR?

I used to memorize random big words from the dictionary and shoehorn them into sentences for attention. Adults loved it, and it’s how I got almost all of my external validation. Now, using big words for attention is basically my entire life.

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JULIANNE MOORE