WAYMAKER TOP 50
Thinkers and teachers whose research, insight, and lived intelligence expand what we know—turning knowledge into tools for healing, progress, and power.
The Woman
Redefining Wellness
Devi Brown is on a mission to make healing tangible and accessible for all.
A well-being educator, advisor, and author, Brown is the founder of her namesake company, Devi Brown Well-Being. Through the organization, she partners with major corporate brands, institutions, and high-impact individuals to create life-changing strategies and experiences rooted in holistic practice, compassion, and creativity.
Brown’s transition into the wellness space didn’t just happen—it was sparked by stress-induced burnout. After a successful, more than decade-long career in radio before the age of 30, she found herself exhausted and knew something had to change. Attending an Ayurvedic retreat became a turning point, pushing her to adopt new habits, set strong boundaries, and make meditation a daily practice. That experience not only transformed her life but also inspired her to share those tools with others in search of balance and healing.
She is the creator and host of the wellness podcast “Deeply Well,” where she engages in thoughtful conversations with high-profile guests. The podcast explores a wide range of topics, including psychology, alternative healing practices, grief and loss, emotional resilience, and the pursuit of inner peace.
A quick scroll through her Instagram page is bound to leave you feeling better mentally, physically, and emotionally. Her page embodies boldness, joy, and healthy living while staying grounded, self-aware, and adaptable to the modern world.
Inspired by her own upbringing and personal healing journey as well as a multi-disciplinary well-being education, Brown’s mission is deeply personal. Through her teachings, conversations, and guided practices, the wellness leader continues to prove that lasting change begins with intention and devotion to daily well-being.
Turning Data
Into Cultural Clarity
Joshua Doss belongs to a generation of political thinkers who know that numbers alone do not move people. Born in Chicago, he sees culture, context, and community as drivers of change. Doss makes political research clear and relevant, especially for Black communities often reduced to statistics.
Through his platform @doss.discourse, Doss turns polling data, electoral trends, and public opinion into real conversations. Notably, his work has reached audiences beyond social media through contributions to public forums and collaborative projects with community organizations. His analyses move fluidly between charts and culture, policy and pop references, history and the present moment. One standout example came when he used Freeway’s 2002 rap single “What We Do” as a framework to explain the economic determinants of crime. By anchoring data in a song deeply familiar to Black audiences, Doss broke down how wages, employment access, housing stability, and opportunity shape outcomes far more than punitive narratives ever could. The result was both instructive and affirming, a reminder that lived experiences often already understand what data later proves.
Doss works as a political pollster and researcher, shaping studies for campaigns, advocacy groups, and policy discussions. He keeps Black voters, economic justice, and narrative central, ensuring research reflects real lives.
Doss makes information a shared tool, not a guarded secret. He helps people understand power, policy, and possibility. He helps communities see how their stories fit into bigger systems and shows that clarity can be a form of empowerment.
Holding AI Accountable
At a time when artificial intelligence is shaping nearly every aspect of daily life, Dr. Joy Buolamwini stands at the forefront of one of the most critical conversations of our era.
An AI researcher, artist, and advocate, Dr. Buolamwini has dedicated her career to exposing and addressing the ethical risks embedded in emerging technologies.
She is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization committed to creating more equitable and accountable AI systems, and the author of “Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines.” Through research and storytelling, Dr. Buolamwini challenges the assumption that technology is inherently neutral.
Her TED Talk on algorithmic bias, released in November 2016, has garnered over 1.7 million views and introduced the world to what she calls “the coded gaze”—a term she coined to describe the embedded biases that shape how algorithms see and interact with people. In the talk, Dr. Buolamwini warned that algorithmic bias, like human bias, results in unfairness with far-reaching consequences. Like viruses, she noted, biased algorithms can spread discrimination rapidly and at a massive scale, leading to exclusionary and harmful outcomes.
Dr. Buolamwini continues to uncover significant racial and gender bias in facial recognition technologies, and her work has since been covered in more than 40 countries, cementing her role as a leading voice in the movement to ensure that innovation does not come at the expense of humanity.
Rethinking Black
Style and Identity
Monica L. Miller entered the public imagination most recently as the guest curator of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” a landmark exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute that centered Black designers, Black masculinity, and the political power of dress. She helped to frame Black style, not as trend or ornament, but as an intellectual and cultural language shaped by history, resistance, and self-definition. The exhibition marked a pivotal moment in fashion history, placing Black diasporic aesthetics firmly within the canon of global design and cultural thought.
That curatorial juncture is a natural extension of Dr. Miller’s decades-long scholarly work. As chair and professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, she has built a career examining how Black people use literature, fashion, and visual culture to articulate identity and agency. Her groundbreaking book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity” redefined how scholars understand dress, tracing how Black men across centuries used style as a form of critique, survival, and imagination. The book earned the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and remains foundational across disciplines.
Dr. Miller moves fluidly between the academy and public culture, showing how theory lives in everyday practices and how aesthetics shape political life. Her work spans Black Atlantic history, gender studies, and global diasporic identity, including research on Blackness beyond U.S. borders.
This work matters because it expands how Black history is taught, studied, and understood. By placing style, aesthetics, and cultural production at the center of historical inquiry, Dr. Miller challenges narrow interpretations of Black life that overlook creativity as a form of knowledge. Her scholarship demonstrates that fashion, literature, and visual expression are not secondary to Black political history but are essential to it. Through her research, teaching, and public-facing work, Dr. Miller helps reshape the archive itself, ensuring that Black history is read not only through struggle but through imagination, intellect, and self-authorship.
Language
Beyond Permission
Sunn m’Cheaux approaches language as a living thing–one that breathes, shifts, and carries memory forward. A native “binya” speaker of Gullah from Charleston, South Carolina, m’Cheaux’s work insists that Black language is not static, broken, or derivative, but evolving, intelligent, and deeply rooted in history. Through teaching, performance, and public scholarship, he reframes Black language as a living archive shaped by survival, migration, resistance, and creativity.
In 2017, m’Cheaux made history as the first instructor to teach Gullah at Harvard University through its African Language Program. That moment signaled a shift in how Black language traditions are valued and studied. m’Cheaux’s work emphasizes that Black language continues to develop through movement, music, digital culture, and everyday speech, adapting to new conditions while carrying ancestral knowledge.
Beyond the classroom, m’Cheaux reaches a global audience through his social platforms, where he unpacks Gullah alongside broader Black language traditions, including African American vernacular speech and Afro-Caribbean–linked expressions. His teaching connects grammar to geography, tone to trauma, and cadence to community, showing how language evolves in response to power, place, and possibility. He treats speech as evidence of thought rather than a deviation from it.
His background as a musician and writer further shapes m’Cheaux’s approach, reminding audiences that Black language has always been innovative because it had to be. By centering Black language as alive and unfinished, he helps protect cultural memory while making room for what is still becoming. His work affirms that to honor Black history fully, we must also celebrate how Black people speak it into the future.