Time magazine has released the 2026 edition of its “most influential” list, spanning leaders and notable figures in politics, sport, technology, fashion, medicine, and many other fields. Included this year are artist Cao Fei and photojournalist Lynsey Addario.
Founded in 1923, Time published its first “most influential” list in 1999. “There is no single metric that defines influence,” writes editor in chief Sam Jacobs. “Our selections are led by the stories that are shaping the world each year and the people who write them. Some are well known to many, others only within their fields. To find them, we poll our editors, reporters, and sources around the world, and review the recommendations that are sent to us every day.”
The list typically includes prominent figures in the arts, such as, in 2025, visual artists Yoshitomo Nara and Mickalene Thomas, architect Annabelle Selldorf, and Miranda July, a novelist and filmmaker who has also ventured into performance art.
Cao Fei has been the subject of a retrospective at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2021) as well as solo exhibitions at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st-Century Arts in Rome (2021), SCAD Museum of Art (2024), the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2024), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2019), MoMA PS1 in New York (2016), and others. She has appeared in international roundups such as the Sharjah Biennial (2023), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Queensland (2018), and the Venice Biennale (2015).
Courtesy Time magazine.
When she won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021, the foundation wrote, “Working with film, digital media, photography, sculpture and performance, Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou, China) has built an extensive body of work over the last two decades that considers how the rapid development of the digital and other technological advancements have radically altered our perception of self and the way we understand and navigate reality.”
For Time, fashion designer Miuccia Prada writes of the artist, “Since we first met in 2007, I’ve known her to be one of the artists best able to analyze modernity in all its most complex and contradictory aspects. Even so, she always keeps the human being in focus in a way I find exceptional.”
For more than two decades, Addario has documented conflict zones, humanitarian crises, and the lives of women in the Middle East and Africa. Her photos have appeared in the New York Times and National Geographic. Assignments have taken her to Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, South Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen, among other troubled locales.
She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2009. “In a time when many readers are becoming numb to the constant flow of images of war, death, and suffering, Addario combines a rigorous journalistic approach with a keen artistic eye to render events in Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq, and elsewhere in startling and unexpected ways,” the foundation wrote. She received Pulitzer Prizes in both 2009 and 2023. In the latter year, the organization awarded the prize “for her single image of a Ukrainian mother, her two children and a church member splayed on the street of a Kyiv suburb after a mortar shell exploded on a “safe passage” route—a photograph that clearly showed that Russia was targeting civilians.”
For Time, journalist Katie Couric writes, “The most recent time I interviewed photojournalist Lynsey Addario, she was hunkered down in a bathtub in Kyiv, clad in a bulletproof PRESS vest and a combat helmet. This was just one of the many times she chose to go into the eye of the storm searching for truth and recording it for history.”
Also on the list are Susan Dell and Michael Dell, who have appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.
