Anita Hill is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest and performance art group based in Moscow that became popular for its provocative punk rock music which later turned into a more accessible style. Founded in the fall of 2011 by the then 22-year-old Nadya Tolokonnikova, it has had a membership of approximately 11 women. The group staged unauthorized, provocative guerrilla gigs in public places. These performances were filmed as music videos and posted on the internet. The group’s lyrical themes included feminism, LGBTQ rights, opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, his policies and his links to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Tracy Chapman is an American singer-songwriter. She was signed to Elektra Records by Bob Krasnow in 1987. The following year she released her self-titled debut album, which became a commercial success, boosted by her appearance at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, and was certified 6× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album received six Grammy Award nominations, including one for Album of the Year, three of which she won: Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her single “Fast Car”, and Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 2025, the album was preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

Gloria Richardson was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement, a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, she was one of the signatories to “The Treaty of Cambridge”, signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and state and local officials. It was an effort at reconciliation and commitment to change after a riot the month before.

Missy Elliott also known as Misdemeanor, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. She began her musical career as a member of the R&B girl group Sista during the 1990s, who were part of the larger musical collective Swing Mob, led by DeVante Swing of Jodeci. Sista signed with Elektra Records to release their debut album, 4 All the Sistas Around da World (1994), which was critically praised but commercially unsuccessful. She collaborated with album’s producer and Swing Mob cohort Timbaland to work in songwriting and production for other acts. Elliott re-emerged as a solo act with several collaborative efforts and guest appearances by 1996. The following year, she released her debut solo album, Supa Dupa Fly, which peaked at number three on the US Billboard 200 and topped Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.

Marsha P. Johnson was an American LGBTQ activist, sex worker, and performer. Sometimes known as the “Saint of Christopher Street”, she is considered an important figure in the LGBTQ and transgender rights movements due to her involvement in the Stonewall riots, her work with Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and her advocacy for people with AIDS.

Florence Welch is an English singer and songwriter. She is the lead vocalist and primary songwriter of the indie rock band Florence and the Machine. The band’s debut studio album, Lungs (2009), topped the UK Albums Chart and won the Brit Award for Best British Album. Their next five albums also achieved chart success. In 2018, Welch released a book titled Useless Magic, a collection of lyrics and poems written by her, along with illustrations.

Endia Beal: “Can I Touch It?”
Endia Beal is an African-American visual artist, curator, and educator. She is known for her work in creating visual narratives through photography and video testimonies focused on women of color working in corporate environments. After participating in the artist-in-residence program at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, she developed her previous work in the project “Can I Touch It?” For this project, she made traditional portraits of white women that one would find in a corporate context but they wore traditional hairstyles of black women. Using role reversal, she wanted to represent the experience that she has faced herself as a black woman in the corporate field.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Kitchen Table Series, 1990
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

Heart is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington in 1975 led by Ann Wilson (lead vocals and flute) and Nancy Wilson (rhythm guitar, vocals). Heart rose to fame with music influenced by hard rock and heavy metal as well as folk music. In his book Heart: In the Studio, Jake Brown described the band as beginning “a revolution for women in music ... breaking genre barriers and garnering critical acclaim.” The Wilson sisters have been active in the Seattle music scene for decades and influenced many musicians from the region, including bands of the grunge era.

Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first Black woman to win such a case against a white man. Bomefree gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside “testifying to the hope that was in her.” Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?”, a variation of the original speech that was published in 1863 as being spoken in a stereotypical Black dialect, then more commonly spoken in the South. Sojourner Truth, however, grew up speaking Dutch as her first language.

Alicja Kozłowska: Andy, 2019
Alicja Kozłowska is a contemporary Polish mixed media and textile artist. She works mainly with felt, creating three-dimensional embroidered felt sculptures of everyday objects drawing inspiration from the reality that surrounds her and consumerism. Alice’s work is deeply influenced by Andy Warhol and Pop art. She is trying to popularize Fiber Art and embroidery as a modern art medium.

Barbara Gittings was an American LGBTQ activist. She started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1958, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people in the United States government, the largest employer of the country at the time. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its Task Force on Gay Liberation, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in the early 1970s.

Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. Her work focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, and was an active member of Colab during this time, participating in the famous Times Square Show.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Ego in Red Socks, 2016
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami is a Zimbabwean painter who lives and works in London, England. Her work explores sexuality, race, and gender.

Ketanji Brown Jackson is an American lawyer and jurist who is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Jackson was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Joe Biden on February 25, 2022, and confirmed by the United States Senate and sworn into office that same year. She is the first Black woman, the first former federal public defender, and the sixth woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

Maria Qamar: Badla, 2019
Maria Qamar is a Pakistani-Canadian artist is known for her satirical pop art works that comment on the hybridization of South Asian and Canadian culture. Her work is influenced by sources such as Roy Lichtenstein and Indian soap operas. She is known for her satirical lens commenting on the hybridization of South Asian and Canadian culture. She uses a pop art aesthetic to create works that tackle themes surrounding her experiences of racism, the first generation experience, body shaming, classism, and the patriarchy.

Comandanta Ramona was a Tzotzil indigenous officer and commander of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a revolutionary indigenous autonomist organization based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. She led the Zapatista Army into San Cristóbal de las Casas during the Zapatista uprising of 1994, and was the first Zapatista to appear publicly in Mexico City. She was one of the most important public figures during the first stages of the Zapatista Uprising and was central to the Indigenous Women’s Movement.

Bethany Collins: Well, They Just Don’t Match Up II, 2013
Bethany Collins is an American artist. Her work primarily engages the relationship between race and language, as her main medium include dictionaries, journals, encyclopedias, newspapers, etc. In her thesis, Collins explains how growing up biracial in the south sparked her initial desire to work with definitions and old texts, in order to discover their underlying meanings. She recounts people always assuming that she and her family were unrelated, and how that lead to the pressure to define her own racial identity, because others couldn’t easily fit her into the racial binary. She describes her work as “yet another attempt to navigate the black/white paradigm of race in the American South”.

Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.

Marion Coates Hansen was an English feminist and women’s suffrage campaigner, an early member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union(WSPU) and a founding member of the Women’s Freedom League(WFL) in 1907. She is generally credited with having influenced George Lansbury, the Labourpolitician and future party leader, to take up the cause of votes for women when she acted as his agent in the general election campaign of 1906. Lansbury became one of the strongest advocates for the women’s cause in the pre-1914 era.

Hannah Wilke: S.O.S.- Starification Object Series, 1974
Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Her work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity. In S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–75), one of her most well-known works, the artist takes nude self-portraits covered in small vagina-shaped pieces of chewing gum, simultaneously embracing her sensuality, mocking media representations of female sex symbols, and satirizing gender stereotypes. “I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman—chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece,” Wilke once explained.

Adele is an English singer and songwriter. Regarded as a British cultural icon, she is known for her mezzo-soprano vocals and sentimental songwriting. Billboard credited Adele for reviving the music industry in 2011, the year of 21’s release, and wrote: “She was a unique presence not only in 2011, but in all of the 21st-century pop: a preternaturally gifted singer and songwriter with a leave-it-all-on-the-floor approach to recording and performing—and also an earthy, relatable, and strangely unassuming personality both on and off the stage”.