Among TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020, three are Ethiopian origins. They are:

Julie Mehretu: “She creates her own language that serves as a portal to a place where expressionism collapses time, only to reveal our relationship to space.

Julie Mehretu’s work—painting abstract three-dimensional landscapes that represent our often chaotic socio-political climate—is profoundly meaningful in the way that it frames stories and places. She creates her own language that serves as a portal to a place where expressionism collapses time, only to reveal our relationship to space.

At the 2019 Venice Biennale’s 58th International exhibition, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Julie referenced maps, architectural diagrams and grids—scientific methodologies specific to architectural systems—and rendered them in a way fully unique to her. Her art holds qualities of memory, history, global mobilities, inequities and sense of place, but through a universal lens.

As an admirer and an architect, I’m both interested and encapsulated by Julie’s ability to let us see reality as it is, rather than how we experience it through our own senses.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “It’s a principle he surely acquired as a child in Ethiopia, where he saw with his own eyes how preventable diseases took the lives of children around him, including his own young brother.”

Crises so often tell us who we are and what we’re made of. For Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the COVID-19 pandemic is just such a defining moment.

Throughout his career, and as director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros has stood firmly for equity and access—the idea that all people, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances, have the right to quality health care.

It’s a principle he surely acquired as a child in Ethiopia, where he saw with his own eyes how preventable diseases took the lives of children around him, including his own young brother. It drove him to play a personal role in the response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it shaped him into the face of hope and determination at the center of the COVID-19 storm.

An experienced scientist and public-health leader, Tedros knows that until we protect the most vulnerable among us from COVID-19, none of us is protected.

Okonjo-Iweala is chair of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; a WHO and African Union envoy on COVID-19; and former Finance Minister of Nigeria
The Weeknd: “He’s a mysterious figure in an era when mystery is rare in pop. And you never know what to expect next.”

The Weeknd: “He’s a mysterious figure in an era when mystery is rare in pop. And you never know what to expect next.”