Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.
Pop Music
Chappell Roan
It’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.
It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.
But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.
All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.
But her ballooning fame hasn’t been without hiccups. Roan, 26 and from small-town Missouri, has been outspoken about toxic fan culture, breaking the fourth wall to call into question the way that fans worship their heroes online and in real life.
“I never really expected it to grow this big,” she said in conversation with the “Saturday Night Live” star Bowen Yang for Interview Magazine this summer. “It’s been really emotional because I’m not just singing pop music, it’s automatically political because I’m gay.”
Whether she’ll choose to forge ahead as she has or take a break, as she’s said she might, is to be seen. But she will be a fixture at the 2025 Grammy Awards in February; she earned six nominations, including best new artist and album of the year.
Television
Richard Gadd
A seven-episode thriller with a troubled lead and intense themes around sexual assault, masculinity and self-loathing might seem like an unlikely show to break through on a global scale. But that’s exactly what happened this year with “Baby Reindeer,” Richard Gadd’s project — which he created, wrote and starred in — about a struggling comedian and his stalker.
Based on his award-winning autobiographical 2019 one-man stage show, the adaptation became far and away the most-watched show on Netflix in the weeks after its April release. In September, the show won six Emmy Awards, including a best actor statuette for Gadd and best limited series.
“I feel like ‘Baby Reindeer’ stood out because a lot of work has become a little bit fearful and a little bit morally forward,” Gadd told British GQ magazine. “I think people are so scared of ruffling feathers and saying anything bad or presenting themselves in negative ways. And I think as a result, some humanity has been lost in some television shows.”
Fine Art
Lotus L. Kang
At the March opening of the 81st Whitney Biennial, throngs of attendees, including plenty of stars of the art world and beyond, lined up to see Lotus L. Kang’s site-specific installation “In Cascades.”
The work is what Kang, 39, has described as “tanned” sheets of light-sensitive film that, because they are exposed to elements like air and humidity, morph over even a short time.
“They’re porous, taking on their own lives, and that precarity is also the reality of the human condition,” Kang told The Times in March.
Earlier this year, she had a solo show at the hottest gallery in Los Angeles, Commonwealth and Council, and an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, in which Kang installed “Receiver Transmitter,” a site-specific greenhouse. She added material objects like lotus shells and tatami mattresses, which have ancestral significance to Kang: Her grandmother, who fled to Seoul from North Korea, used to sleep on one in her grain and seed shop.
“It has a lot to do with memory, time and containing things,” Kang, a Canadian artist based in Brooklyn, told S magazine of the work.
The Times critic Jason Farago called Kang an artist of rare precision and said her European debut last year was “a richly sedimented, beautifully vulnerable installation in a perpetual state of becoming.”
Next up for Kang: a solo show at 52 Walker in New York in April.
Theater
Cole Escola
The belle of the ball. The toast of the town. New, now, next. The playwright, actor and performer Cole Escola has received heaps of praise as their rollicking madcap play “Oh, Mary!” moved from the Lucille Lortel Theater downtown to Broadway’s Lyceum Theater. Its sold-out shows have drawn the likes of Timothée Chalamet, Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Lange, Pedro Pascal and Steven Spielberg.
Escola quickly became a presence on late-night talk shows and red-carpet events; they made a splash in a modest bride-like ensemble at this year’s Met Gala, securing an invite from Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, after she’d attended the play.
Our chief theater critic, Jesse Green, called “Oh Mary!” — which Escola wrote during the pandemic lockdown — one of the “best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years, which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.”
In it, Escola stars as a highly fictionalized version of the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, a boozy cabaret performer desperate to escape her husband, Gaybraham Lincoln, if you will.
Before this breakthrough, Escola, 38, had gained a cult following on YouTube then made the leap to TV in supporting roles on “Search Party” and “At Home With Amy Sedaris.” Even earlier, they were ever-present in New York’s alt-cabaret circuit.
Reflecting on how far they’ve come, Escola told GQ magazine, “I do have a ‘Wow, pinch me’ sort of feeling sometimes when I’m walking around and I remember, ‘I’m on Broadway. I’m on Broadway.’”
The show’s run continues to get extended; Escola stars until Jan. 19, then Betty Gilpin (“Glow”) will take over for eight weeks, and we’ll have to wait and see what happens after that — the show is scheduled to run through June.
Influencer
Kai Cenat
For the energetic, good-natured superstar influencer Kai Cenat, the sky might just be the limit. Quite literally. In a November post on X, Cenat, among the most streamed people on Earth with a legion of over 15 million followers on Twitch alone, proposed to Elon Musk that he be the first to stream from space.
“Let’s make history,” Cenat, 23, wrote.
While Musk, who owns X, founded SpaceX and is now closely involved in President-elect Trump’s circle, hasn’t yet responded, the ambitious request is on brand for Cenat, who has a history of swinging big, often to great success.
Last year, Cenat was credited with coining the Gen Z slang term “rizz” (derived from “charisma”), which was Oxford’s Word of the Year. He also attracted thousands of young people to Union Square in New York City by announcing he’d be giving away tech equipment including PlayStation 5 consoles, a controversial call-out that led to some legal trouble.
And this year, around Thanksgiving, Cenat wrapped up “Mafiathon 2,” his round-the-clock monthlong star-studded livestream marathon; SZA, Snoop Dogg, Bill Nye, Lizzo and Benny Blanco swung by. The event made history, pushing Cenat well past the 700,000 subscribers mark, making his the top Twitch account by a healthy margin. According the analytics website SullyGnome, the event generated about 80 million hours watched.
“Every time that I do feel tired or it’s tough,” Cenat told his watchers when he passed the 500,000 subscriber mark, “y’all always prove to me why I should keep going.”
Classical
Emily D’Angelo
On opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s season, Emily D’Angelo, the star of the show, turned 30 years old — a fitting and celebratory culmination of the mezzo soprano’s remarkable rise in the classical world.
The opera, “Grounded” — commissioned by the Met and based on librettist George Brant — was adapted by the Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home,” “Kimberly Akimbo”), who wrote the score with D’Angelo’s voice in mind.
“It’s a huge honor and also a huge responsibility,” D’Angelo told Vogue in the lead-up to the night. D’Angelo starred as Jess, a fighter pilot turned dissociated drone operator during the Iraq War, her “dusky, penetrating tone the vocal embodiment of an anxiously furrowed brow,” our classical music critic wrote.
“The emotions get as big as they possibly can,” D’Angelo wrote for The Cut. “We all have to overcome fear and trick ourselves into being brave.”
Podcast
Shannon Sharpe
Shannon Sharpe accomplished plenty during his 14 seasons in the N.F.L., winning three Super Bowl rings and earning induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He has found another level of success off the field with his interview podcast “Club Shay Shay.” It debuted in 2020, and has since built an audience of sports fans and those interested in Black Hollywood, with guests including Mike Tyson, John Legend, and Serena and Venus Williams.
But it was just a few days into January that his show broke the internet when Sharpe interviewed the comic Katt Williams for nearly three hours of outrageous, rollicking and at times incendiary commentary on the entertainment industry and Williams’s life. The episode has been streamed about 85 million times on YouTube alone, and the show has remained among the most popular podcasts in the United States since.
Sharpe has also benefited from the once audio-only genre’s shift to video, with scores of fans now opting to watch their podcasts instead of just listen.
“There’s something about video and being able to see it for yourself,” Sharpe, 56, told The Times in April. “You can get a sense of a person and their mannerisms.
Sharpe, who grew up poor in Glennville, Ga., has long said that his success has been guided by the “three Ds”: determination, discipline and dedication.
“I don’t know how to give 50 percent or 75 percent,” he told Sports Illustrated in November. “When I commit, it’s 100 percent or nothing.”
Movies
Mikey Madison
Oscar buzz is buzzing big time for Mikey Madison, who delivered, as our film critic put it, “a star-making turn” in “Anora,” Sean Baker’s film about the whirlwind romance and quickie marriage between a tough yet disarming sex worker, Ani (Madison), and the son of Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn).
The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the festival’s highest honor. Madison is also a best actress nominee at the upcoming Golden Globes.
This role required Madison, 25 and soft-spoken in real life, to go full out (she turned to acting as a way to help her overcome what she’s called debilitating shyness). To prepare, she spent time living in Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave in Brooklyn; dedicated every waking moment to listening to Russian; and read memoirs by sex workers. She even had a stripper pole installed in her living room, though she only would appear briefly on one in the film.
Learning is what she does best, several of her collaborators told The Times.
Pamela Adlon, the creator and star of the acclaimed FX series “Better Things” — in which Madison, starting at age 16, starred as her surly teenage daughter — said that Madison “wants to learn and know, so she was my clay and she was a sponge.”
Madison, a Los Angeles native who has practically no presence online, said she doesn’t fully comprehend the attention she’s now receiving.
But Baker isn’t surprised. He sees Madison as potentially the next Margot Robbie or Emma Stone, saying: “The talent’s there, the looks are there, the determination is there.”
Comedy
Nikki Glaser
Nikki Glaser has long been renown in comedy circles for her work ethic and raunchy but razor-sharp jokes. This year, the stars aligned for the comic, who was able to captivate American audiences with back-to-back hits: First with the live roast of Tom Brady on Netflix, the most-viewed one-off special in the streamer’s history when it aired in May, which catapulted her career, and then with her Max stand-up comedy special “Someday You’ll Die.”
Glaser, 40, told People magazine that the roast was “a night that changed my life forever.”
“I knew that it was going to be a big moment of my career,” she said, “but I didn’t know that it would be the linchpin that I’ll always reference that point as before and after the roast.”
During a wide-ranging interview on his podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” O’Brien told Glaser: “You’re having more than a moment, and it’s because you deserve it.” He called her roast of Brady the greatest of all time.
In “Someday You’ll Die,” she delivered a punchline bonanza from unexpected material including her struggles with suicidal ideation. Our comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, called the special a “knockout,” adding, “her joke tool kit overflows.”
Soon Glaser will be holding court as host of the Golden Globe Awards. The Globes, she said in a statement, is “one of the few times that show business not only allows, but encourages itself to be lovingly mocked (at least I hope so). (God I hope so).”
Dance
Chloe Misseldine
Statuesque, agile and fearless, the American Ballet Theater soloist Chloe Misseldine has a “distinctive otherworldly magnetism,” our dance critic, Gia Kourlas, wrote in July.
At the Metropolitan Opera House this year, Misseldine wowed audiences and critics as Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake” and Tatiana in the ballet “Onegin,” a ballet by John Cranko based on Pushkin’s verse novel that required her to express maturity well beyond her 22 years.
“She is a rising star,” Susan Jaffe, the artistic director of Ballet Theater, told Kourlas this summer. “Not just in A.B.T., but in the dance world.”
Jaffe, who promoted Misseldine to principal on the Met stage after her New York debut in “Swan Lake,” added, “Everything that comes to her, she just takes it with absolute solidity and grace, and works hard and isn’t freaked out.”
After dancing Tatiana, Misseldine said, “I’m growing up a little bit through roles like this.”
Misseldine’s first dance teacher was her mother, the former Ballet Theater soloist Yan Chen, who was born in China and trained at the Shanghai Dance School. Chen taught at the Orlando Ballet School, in Florida, where Misseldine was born. When asked if she had a sense of Misseldine’s potential, Chen said “No!” with a laugh.
Misseldine said her physicality and her thick skin didn’t originate solely in the classroom, but also from her upbringing as the middle child with two brothers. “That’s where I get my personality from,” she said, “living with my brothers, growing up with boys, but then also doing ballet.”
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