Teyana Taylor

Kanye premiered Fade at the 2016 MTV VMAs and Taylor danced through the whole thing, and most people watching had no idea who she was. She'd been on GOOD Music since 2012, signed with the Neptunes' Star Trak Entertainment at 15, choreographed a Beyoncé video that same year. None of it had made her famous in the way you'd expect. The Fade performance did. The video won Best Choreography at the MTV VMAs, and for a lot of people it was the first time they'd looked her up.

She declared retirement from music in December 2020, writing that she felt "super under appreciated as a artist" with "little to no real push from the machine." The declaration didn't last. Her performance in A Thousand and One (2023) won Best Breakthrough Performance from the National Board of Review, and Paul Thomas Anderson saw it, reached out, and cast her as Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After Another. She won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and earned an Oscar nomination. GOOD Music's most overlooked artist is now a legitimate awards contender.

Her first daughter, Junie, arrived in 2015 on the bathroom floor of their home, with then-boyfriend Iman Shumpert delivering her while paramedics were on the way. She's from Harlem and her mother has reportedly managed her career since she was 15. She's directed her own music videos and choreographed professionally since she was a teenager. Acting is where the industry finally agreed with her assessment of herself.