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he last year has been one of unprecedented challenges — a global health crisis, social-justice uprisings, political upheaval. Still, the women highlighted in our third annual “Women Shaping the Future” feature found a path to their best work. From Atlanta

By Alex Morris

It’s exactly one week after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and her nerves having been frayed like a rodeo rope, Kacey Musgraves is today opting for some self-care. This is how she finds herself, raven tendrils piled carelessly atop her head, pale cheeks slightly flushed, in a floral and fetching Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit and up to her armpits in steaming hot water in a private session at Nashville’s Holiday Salon & Bathhouse (“Sweat Out Your Sins,” its bumper sticker beckons, with a cheekiness...

mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose leadership through the pandemic and protests made her a rising star in the Democratic party, to filmmaker Garrett Bradley, whose Oscar-nominated documentary Time put a human face to mass incarceration, they all have much to teach us about persistence, grit, and the power of staying true to yourself. Many of the artists and musicians we spoke to took time during isolation to contemplate and go deeper than ever with their craft. “I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on growing up as a woman in the South,” says crossover country star Kacey Musgraves. “We were told to please, to make this person happy.... So I’m trying to examine things that may not be useful anymore and maybe unlearn some things.” Throughout this list, you’ll find women who are rewriting the stories we’ve been told about ourselves and our world. Thanks to their success, they’re helping us do the same.

—ALISON WEINFLASH

Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Willow Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith

By Brittany Spanos

When Willow Smith was 11, she made a request of her mom, the actress and musician Jada Pinkett Smith: “I know you as my mother, but I want to know who you were before you were my mother.” Pinkett Smith was shocked that her daughter was already curious in that way. She was also open to revealing more of herself. So, that Mother’s Day, Pinkett Smith called up her own mom, Adrienne Banfield-Norris...

By EJ Dickson

It’s hard for PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor to pick one moment that encapsulates the experience of covering the Trump White House. But if she had to choose, it would be in March, fairly early in the pandemic, when she took the mic at a press briefing and calmly asked President Trump why the White House had dismantled its pandemic-response office. “Well, I just think it’s a nasty question,” the president fumed. A few weeks later, in response to a question Alcindor asked about the availability of ventilators, he chided her again: “Be nice. Don’t be threatening.” Trump’s abrasive remarks...

Paloma Rocío Castillo Astorga was just 18 when she wrote her first song. She self-released it as a single — “Not Steady,” a gauzy, Spanglish R&B reproach to an overzealous suitor — with a music video that she filmed in the parking lot of her tía’s apartment complex. Within a few months, she became the first Chilean American artist to sign to Sony Music Latin. “Literally, ‘Not Steady’ was the first song I ever wrote, ever sang, ever...

By Stefanie Fernández

Paloma Mami

By Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Starting in the early 2000s, sports pundits began predicting that, any moment now, Kim Ng would become the first female general manager in Major League Baseball. They floated the idea in 2005, when she interviewed for the job with the Los Angeles Dodgers. It came up again in 2009, when she was considered for the role with the San Diego Padres. Five times over 15 years, reports surfaced that Ng was on the short list to be a GM. But it...

Kim Ng

By Hannah Murphy

It’s early January, and Sarah McBride is sitting at a desk in her parents’ house in Delaware. A “Sarah McBride for State Senate” yard sign is wedged between a bookshelf and the wall — already a relic from the election she won two months earlier. “It’s been a whirlwind,” she says, leaning forward and taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. And not just because it’s her first time holding public office: When she won her election for state senator...

Sarah McBride

By Maria Fontoura

To see Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine without braces, slumped shoulders, and their signature hairdos — bowl cut for Erskine, strategic strands rigidly framing her face for Konkle — is, for the first few seconds, a little disorienting. Their Pen15 characters, middle schoolers Anna Konkle and Maya Ishii-Peters, are so comforting in their awkwardness, such perfect avatars for the 13-year-old that lives inside all of...

By Jenna Scherer

Marielle Heller had tried everything. She was nearly a year into her campaign to adapt The Diary of a Teenage Girl, cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel, into a play, and she was no closer to her goal. At the time...

By Brittany Spanos

Last spring, Koffee was looking forward to a pivotal year in her career. At 19 years old, she’d just won the Best Reggae Album Grammy for her 2019 EP, Rapture, making history as the first woman and the youngest artist ever to take home that award. Next up, she was slated to play...

By Hank Shteamer

Nandi Bushell is midway through a busy Saturday when she logs on to Zoom: She’s just spent the morning taking advantage of a rare snowfall in her home of Ipswich, England. “First, I just threw snowballs at my brother,” says the 10-year-old musician, who became an online sensation last fall thanks to a YouTube drum battle with one of her idols, Dave Grohl. “Then, all of the other kids in my street started playing. We got the sled out and sledded down the street, and then...

By Tessa Stuart

A year ago, schools across the country closed their doors in hopes of slowing the spread of a strange new virus. What happened next depended on a parent’s zip code, their income, the political persuasion of their state officials, and the relative power of their local teachers unions. In the absence of any official advice or guidance — save late-summer admonition from then-President Trump that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE...

Emily Oster

By Samantha Hissong

Suzy Shinn grew up listening to bands like Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin, so she was thrilled when Andrew McMahon, the vocalist in both bands, called in December with the beginnings of a solo song. The only problem: They had about three days to finish the track. So she set up in her living room in L.A.’s Los Feliz, called a couple of masked-and-distanced friends to engineer and play violin, and made do. “I was like...

Suzy Shinn

By Maria Fontoura

Marisa Acocella was raised in a devout Catholic family. But one of the Bible’s main teachings seriously bugged her. “I always thought, how could a male God give birth to all this?” Acocella says, gesturing at … everything. “It never made sense to me. There had to be a God the Mother." The question nagged her all through her childhood in Roselle Park, New Jersey, her college years studying art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, her early jobs in...

Marisa Acocella

By Angie Martoccio

Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner will release her long-awaited memoir, Crying in H Mart, on April 20, 2021. Based on an essay published by The New Yorker in 2018, the memoir focuses on Zauner’s upbringing as an Asian American in Eugene, Oregon, and her relationship with her mother, who died of cancer when she was 25. “My mother passed away almost six years ago and ever since, my life has felt folded in half, divided into a before and after her death, my identity and my family having been fractured in the wake of her loss,” Zauner said in a statement...

By EJ Dickson

Ayo Edebiri still remembers the first joke she ever told. She was in eighth grade and had just joined the improv team at her school in Boston. She was an anxious, nerdy teen, fond of writing fan fiction about Jacob Black from Twilight eating hot dogs. Improv was not necessarily an obvious fit. Then she made a crack about why Christians’ favorite cheese was Swiss: “Because it’s holy,” she says, rolling her eyes. “For some reason, people thought that was really funny.” (For the record, this reporter laughed.)...

By Tessa Stuart

The past year of Keisha Lance Bottoms’ life has been, to borrow one of the Atlanta mayor’s favorite euphemisms, interesting. When she’s got nothing nice to say about a situation, Bottoms, diplomatic Southerner that she is, reaches for this damningly anodyne descriptor. It’s all in the delivery. Consider, for example, the fact that in the middle of a pandemic killing black Georgians by the thousands, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp had the...

By Phoebe Neidl

In 1976, Kathy Sullivan was finishing up her Ph.D. in oceanography when an intriguing, if somewhat far-fetched, opportunity presented itself: the chance to become an astronaut. Her expertise was in the geology of the deep-sea floor, a few hundred miles in the exact opposite direction of where a space flight would take her, and joining NASA, she realized, could shut the door forever on her career in oceanography...

Kathy Sullivan

By K. Austin Collins

At the tail end of Time — the feature-length documentary that, since its heralded Sundance debut last year, has deservedly made its director, Garrett Bradley, one of the film world’s women of the hour — an extraordinary thing happens. The movie follows a black family living in the shadow of incarceration. At the center of that family is Sibil Richardson, known as Fox Rich, whose husband, Robert, is...

Garrett Bradley

By Andrea Marks

Deja Foxx was unpacking in her dorm room to start her sophomore year at Columbia University when Meena Harris DM’d her about working on her Aunt Kamala’s presidential campaign. “I just started repacking,” Foxx says, laughing. “I wasn’t going to sit in a classroom and talk about Plato and Aristotle when I had skills that could make a difference.” The youngest staffer on Kamala Harris’ campaign, Foxx, at 19, was already a...

Deja Foxx

By Amy Nicholson

Last March, Julia Garner shot an all-day subway scene with 400 extras in New York for the upcoming Netflix series Inventing Anna. By the time she took off her wig, she heard production had shut down due to the pandemic. So, she flew home, fell asleep for a month, found two suitcases she hadn’t unpacked since 2018, and for the first time in four years, spent some extended time in her own skin. Which, as pale and platinum-curled and recognizable as that skin is, couldn’t be more different from the characters who’ve made her famous — especially Ozark’s Ruth Langmore, a money-laundering moppet who exhales expletives, assassinates her uncles, and marches through the casino boats of central...

These artists, activists, creators, and innovators are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in their fields — and showing us all a better way forward

By Alex Morris

By Brittany Spanos

Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Willow Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith

By Brittany Spanos

Paloma Mami

By Stefanie Fernández

Paloma Mami

By Stefanie Fernández

By Hannah Murphy

By Jenna Scherer

By Brittany Spanos

Sarah McBride

By Hannah Murphy

Emily Oster

By Tessa Stuart

Suzy Shinn

By Samantha Hissong

By Maria Fontoura

By Angie Martoccio

By EJ Dickson

Marisa Acocelle

By Maria Fontoura

Kathy Sullivan

By Phoebe Neidl

Garrett Bradley

By K. Austin Collins

By Andrea Marks

Ryan McGinley for Rolling Stone

Yana Yatsuk for Rolling Stone

Nate Palmer for Rolling Stone

Daniel Toledo

Joseph Guzy

Morgan Levy for Rolling Stone

Adrian McDonald for Rolling Stone

Serena Brown for Rolling Stone

Kannetha Brown for Rolling Stone

Jessica Lehrman for Rolling Stone

Maria Wurtz for Rolling Stone

Myles Loftin

Braylen Dion for Rolling Stone

Maddie McGarvey for Rolling Stone

blvxmth for Rolling Stone

Nolwen Cifuentes for Rolling Stone

Michael Schwartz/Trunk Archive

By Jenna Scherer

Ben Ritter/The New York Times/Redux