Wondering who to keep an eye on in 2025? These professionals are making sizeable contributions to the field. For our power list to reach into the corners where work is carried out that broadens our field and within the local and tighter-knit circles whose work impacts through its ripples, we selected jurors, who in turn nominated jurors. They are anonymous, but all on the list, except our editor-in-chief, who you know already. We have made it a point to highlight colleagues working in regions of accelerated growth, with large investments in the arts. Over ten years, Cultbytes has published 400 articles written by more than 90 contributors, many topics are spearheaded by people on this list and we look forward to its editorial impact in the year to come.

Our rubrics are: Driving Ideas (because we appreciate those who dare to follow their path and others who are ahead of the curve), Collaborative and Feminist Practices (what would we be without them?), On The Rise (emerging talent and those working on new projects), On Migration and Immigrant Artists (because immigration continues to be a hot topic), and Strategic Growth and Expansion (those who support growth in a visionary way).

Brittany Nelson, Artist, New York
At her solo show Meet Me at Infinity at Fotogalleriet Brittany Nelson dubbed the Mars Rover Opportunity, a “queer icon.” Why not? It lived alone on Mars for fourteen years searching for companionship. Using outer space, sci-fi, and techno fetishisms as metaphors for queerness, Nelson’s photographic oeuvre explores the human desire for connection and the loneliness that it can produce. She has made work about Alice B. Sheldon, pen-name James Tiptree, a sci-fi author of the 1970s, correspondence with Ursula LeGuin whom she had unspoken affection for. In her most recent exhibition at Luhring Augustine, she showed striking photographic portraits of telescopes taken during a residency at the SETI Institute in California—their job is to search for life in space.

Juror Motivation: “Brittany Nelson shows us the benefits of thinking beyond patriarchal structures surrounding space—perhaps it is not only domination but also intimacy we are longing for as we continue to expand its outer edges?”