For many of us, 2022 was the year we came out of our pandemic cocoons more fully, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts – exploring our entertainment with eager if tired hearts and eyes before returning to our TVs. Gradually, for the first time in years, artists and performers from all over the world of the arts had the opportunity to engage more closely and fully with the audience and perform big. Here are seven stars that caught our attention right now and gave us a new perspective.
Television
Quinta Brunson
In 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At Buzzfeed, where she first got paid for tasting Doritos, she created hit comedy videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’.
That trajectory propelled her to deliver a rare feat: a heartfelt but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has thrilled critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. . The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, winning three.
“I think a lot of people enjoy something light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told DailyExpertNews Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”
When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed to a TV screen and said, ‘There’s no one like you — that seems impossible,'” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out her screen presence was both possible and unforgettable, especially her stunning performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-bending acid journey through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box office hit. hit and had critical acclaim.
In ‘Everything’, her first feature film, Hsu tackled the complex role of both a depressed, desperate daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.
“I think it’s so rare that you can experience the breadth of reach within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.
Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action comedy series ‘American Born Chinese’; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, ‘Poker Face’, alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
Those on TikTok probably first got wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “What’s Poppin”. But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year – the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 – that his star really started to rise.
Now the laid-back Harlow, 24 and a native of Kentucky, had his first solo No. 1 hit, the Fergie sampling “First Class,” off his second major label album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” which dropped in May. In November, he earned three Grammy nominations, including Best Rap Album. And in October he was both host and musical guest on ‘Saturday Night Live’.
“I’m trying to get away from rapping in a way where people can marvel at it and more something we can all enjoy together,” he told The Times this year.
Harlow will soon star in a remake of the 1992 film White Men Can’t Jump.
Art
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Over the past few years, 41-year-old Tiona Nekkia McClodden “has emerged as one of the most extraordinary artists of our aesthetically rich free-range era,” wrote Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The Times, in her review of McClodden’s exhibition ‘Mask/Conceal/Carry’, a meditation on weapons that was shown this year at 52 Walker in TriBeCa. Smith called it a “nesting beast of an exhibit, bathed in blue light.”
And that was just one of three major presentations of McClodden’s work in New York in 2022. At the Museum of Modern Art, she presented a room-sized fetish-themed tribute to Brad Johnson, a black gay poet who died in 2011. Shed celebrated the groundbreaking 1983 Dance Black America festival with a program of custom dance floors and video portraits of dancers.
McClodden, who was a star at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (she won the Bucksbaum Award), emerged as a filmmaker before branching out into groundbreaking art installations.
In the midst of the pandemic and George Floyd’s protests and counter-protests, she decided to learn how to shoot guns, an activity called “Mask/Conceal/Carry.” “The explanation is that I’m in the world, I didn’t try to run away from my position in this world, and I wanted to be able to defend myself,” she told The Times this summer.
Theater
Julie Benco
Few can say they jumped at an opportunity like Julie Benko, whose month-long summer run as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” was much-changing for the actress-soprano who stepped into the role full-time between Beanie Feldstein and Lea. Michele in the high-profile production. But even that pressure didn’t weigh her down.
“When you get the chance to play such a great role, you don’t have to take it too seriously,” Benko told The Times. “You just have to enjoy it.” Now Benko is titled “alternate” in “Funny Girl”, not “understudy”, and will star in most of the Thursday night shows (with an additional appearance on Monday, December 26, and a full week in late February).
Benko, 33, underplayed several roles before “Funny Girl,” including in the 2008 national “Spring Awakening” tour, and later on the “Les Misérables” tour, where she worked her way up to Cosette, the lead, of roles like “the innkeeper’s wife.”
In December she will perform with her husband, the pianist Jason Yeager, at 54 Below in New York.
Classical music
Davone Tines
“No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition,” Oussama Zahr, a classical music critic, recently wrote in The Times when reviewing “Recital No. 1: MASS,” the personal and carefully arranged Carnegie Hall debut of the bass-baritone.
“I really like structures,” Tines, who is in her mid-30s, told The New Yorker about “MASS” last year. “The ritual model of the Mass is a time-tested structure – centuries of culture have preserved it. Everything I put in it will take on a certain shape. And what I put into it is my own lived experience.
Tines’ accolades are piling up, including his performance this fall in a staged version of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at the Park Avenue Armory; and for “Everything Rises,” his collaboration with violinist Jennifer Koh, who opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In the work, Tines and Koh talk about their complicated relationship with classical music as people of color. “I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines sings. “I hated myself for needing you, dear whites: money, access, and fame.”
Dance
Catherine Hurlin
She may only be 26, but the ballerina Catherine Hurlin has been on the rise for more than half her life. As a girl, she received a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Not long after, she became an apprentice at the ABT, then a member of the corps de ballet and finally a soloist in 2018.
Then this summer she was one of three dancers promoted to the role of first captain.
“The simple serenity of Hurlin’s face, framed by cascading curls, is captivating, as is the bold scope of her expressive, unique dance,” wrote The Times’ dance critic Gia Kourlas in June of Hurlin’s performance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Of Love and anger.”
And in July, when Hurlin made her debut in the double role of Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” Kourlas called her “the future of ballet theater, the kind of dancer with a fresh take on narrative ballet.”
Her nickname? Hurricane.