JUDGES
Rachel Bloom, writer, comedian, cocreator
of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Under 30 Class of
2016)
Gale Anne Hurd, CEO, Valhalla
Entertainment
Kathleen Kennedy, president, Lucasfi lm
Mira Nair, director, producer, writer60 | FORBES ASIA DECEMBER 2017Amandla Stenberg, 19
ACTOR-AUTHOR
“Oftentimes when we play black women, we
have to play either the pain or the comedy,” says
Amandla Stenberg. “Just now are we starting to
have three-dimensional, nuanced black characters
for young women.” After landing a part as Rue in
2012’s Hunger Games, she starred in an adaptation
of the young-adult bestseller Everything, Everything,
playing, Maddy, a teenage polymath in an interracial
relationship. The 2017 love story grossed a healthy
$61.5 million on a $10 million budget.
She has pushed herself beyond fi lm and tele-
vision, coauthoring the graphic novel series Niobe:
She Is Life—the fi rst to be internationally distributed
with a black female author, artist and main character.
In 2015 Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows, a video
about cultural appropriation she’d made for her high
school history class, went viral. Stenberg, who has
also created two short fi lms, sees herself in the di-
rector’s chair soon. “I defi nitely feel it is my respon-
sibility as someone who’s been given a platform at
a very young age to utilize it in a way that reaches
people and helps people and makes them happy.”
—Natalie Robehmed, Madeline Berg and Hayley
CuccinelloHOLLYWOOD &
ENTERTAINMENT
Fatimah Asghar, Sam Bailey, 28, 28
Cocreators, Brown Girls
Olivia Blaustein, 29
Agent, Creative Artists Agency
Kara Brown, 29
Writer
Steven Caple Jr., 29
Director-writer
Ben Davis, 28
Agent, WME
Eric Fleischman, 28
Cofounder-producer, Defi ant Studios
Sabaah Folayan, 27
Director-producer
Jermaine Fowler, 29
Actor-comedian
Micah Fowler, 19
Actor
Sam French, 28
Head of strategy and business development, A 24
Gigi Gorgeous, 25
Digital star
Amanda Hymson, 29
Agent, United Talent Agency
Riley Keough, 28
Actor
Joel Kim Booster, 29
Comedian-writer
Zoe Kravitz, 29
Actor
Daniel Kwan, 29
Director
Sasha Lane, 22
Actor
Juan Pablo Martinez Zurita, 21
Digital star
Madina Nalwanga, 17
Actor
Sono Patel, 29
Producer-writer
Ben Platt, 24
Actor
Esther Povitsky, 29
Actor-comedian
Madeline Sayet, 28
Director
Yara Shahidi, 17
Actor
Alia Shawkat, 28
Actor
Trey Shults, 29
Director-producer-writer
Kofi Siriboe, 23
Actor
Hailee Steinfeld, 21
Actor-musician
Amandla Stenberg, 19
Actor-author
Kaitlyn Yang, 29
Founder, Alpha Studios3O 3O
AMANDLA STENBERG WEARS A STRETCH COTTON-AND-WOOL DRESS BY YIGAL AZROUËL ($890) AND SANDALS BY GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI ($845). EARRINGS BY LINGUA NIGRA ($128)STYLE ASSISTANT: JOHN ANTHONY BONILLA; HAIR AND MAKEUP: KATHLEEN MARSH