Time's 100 Most Influential List Includes Cao Fei And Lynsey Addario

Time has released its 2026 list of the world's most influential figures, and this year's selection places contemporary art and photojournalism alongside politics, fashion, medicine, and technology. Among the names singled out are Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978) and photojournalist Lynsey Addario, two figures whose work has shaped how audiences understand digital life and global conflict.

Founded in 1923, Time published its first influence list in 1999. In his introduction to the 2026 edition, editor in chief Sam Jacobs wrote that there is“no single metric that defines influence,” adding that the magazine's choices are guided by the stories shaping the world and the people who tell them. The selections, he said, come from polling editors, reporters, and sources around the world, as well as reviewing recommendations submitted daily.

Cao's inclusion reflects a career that has moved fluidly across film, digital media, photography, sculpture, and performance. She has been the subject of a retrospective at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and has mounted solo exhibitions at MAXXI in Rome, the SCAD Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and MoMA PS1 in New York. Her work has also appeared in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. In 2021, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize recognized her practice for its sustained inquiry into how technology reshapes perception and reality.

Fashion designer Miuccia Prada, who wrote about Cao for Time, praised the artist's ability to analyze modernity while keeping the human figure at the center of the work.

Addario's career has taken a different but equally consequential path. For more than two decades, she has documented conflict zones, humanitarian crises, and the lives of women across the Middle East and Africa. Her photographs have appeared in the New York Times and National Geographic, and her assignments have brought her to Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, South Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen. She received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2009 and Pulitzer Prizes in 2009 and 2023, the latter for a photograph made in the aftermath of a mortar attack in a Kyiv suburb.

Journalist Katie Couric, who contributed a tribute for Time, described Addario as someone willing to enter danger in search of truth and historical record.

Susan Dell and Michael Dell also appear on the 2026 list, underscoring Time's broad definition of influence across culture, philanthropy, and public life.

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