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A folklorist by training, Susan Levitas has used documentary and feature films to capture unexpected facets of the cultural history of the American South, from blues musicians in Washington to Jewish boxers in Savannah.

Ruth Kullman has dedicated her career to working for positive change in her community, from chairing her local Planned Parenthood to helping her synagogue recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Rebuilding her life time and again after great upheaval gave Lis Kahn unique insight as she helped the Jewish community of New Orleans heal after Hurricane Katrina.

The first female president of her childhood synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, Jackie Gothard helped the Orthodox synagogue rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

A seasoned social worker and executive director of Jewish Family Service of Greater New Orleans, Deena Gerber helped residents put their lives back together in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Committed to youth leadership long before Hurricane Katrina, Sally Bronston lobbied on behalf of her community through the New Orleans Youth Leadership Council before turning to a career in journalism.

When the hospital tending Lainie Breaux’s newborn son temporarily lost contact with her during Hurricane Katrina, Breaux used her fifteen minutes of fame to call attention to the plight of others devastated by the hurricane.

Among those of us who have been traveling in her wake for decades, she was and is a model of how to live, as well as how to write, courageously and sanely, with artistic craft and generosity, out of a profound love of our shared life.

In 1987, Lillian Vernon took her mail-order company public, making it the first company founded by a woman and traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Frieda Caplan’s specialty food company has helped introduce a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to American palates, from kiwis and Asian pears to spaghetti squash and habanero chilies.

Rather than try her fortune directly through prospecting, Fanny Brooks followed the Gold Rush as a teenager and opened a successful general store and boarding house, creating the infrastructure to support other pioneers.

Hailed as the most important woman on Wall Street for her work as CFO of Morgan Stanley, Ruth Porat became Google’s first female CFO in 2015.

The only woman in the Yale Law School class of 1941, Shirley Adelson Siegel became a trailblazer as head of the New York State Attorney’s first Civil Rights Bureau in 1959.

Adeline Moses Loeb died just a few months before the opening of the Central Park boathouse she had helped create.

Bertha Rayner Frank became the epicenter of a national debate on anti-Semitism when she forced an Atlantic City hotel to publicly apologize for refusing to serve Jews.

Body-positive blogger Nicolette Mason has become a leader in creating and celebrating fashion for women of all sizes and shapes.

Erika Meitner’s poetry plays with the idea of overlooked but vital spaces, from malls and suburban developments to women’s bodies.

Naomi sometimes described herself as a female Lenny Bruce. But she was not an imitation anything. She was pure Naomi.

An actress with a long history of activism, House star Lisa Edelstein organized her first protest at age sixteen as a cheerleader for Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, outraged that the cheerleaders were forced to flirt in bars.

After a highly successful decade as the lead on Little House on the Prairie, Melissa Gilbert defied the odds for child actors by becoming a Hollywood power-broker as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 2001–2005.

Kyra Sedgwick earned praise for a variety of supporting and starring roles in films, but it was her award-winning, seven-year stint as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on The Closer that made her a household name.

While she is best known as the iconic Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker’s roles in theater, television and film have run the gamut from instant classics like 1984’s Footloose and 1991’s LA Story to cult favorites like 1994’s Ed Wood and 1996’s Mars Attacks!

In her four decades as an Emmy- and Tony-winning actress, Judith Light has repeatedly taken on challenging and unconventional roles, from a housewife-turned-prostitute on One Life to Live to ex-wife of a transgender woman on the acclaimed Transparent.

Inspired by the youth villages that allowed Israel to welcome staggering numbers of orphans after the Holocaust, Anne Heyman created the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village to shelter orphans of the Rwandan genocide.