Amandla Stenberg
Actor
Vital, political, uncompromising: this teenage actor has broken the mould of the child star and refashioned it in her own image
Having first come to prominence in The Hunger Games, actor Amandla Stenberg has transcended the typical trajectory of a child star. She is teen star 2.0: braver, bolder and more political than her predecessors. Much can been made of the fact that Stenberg was named after the Zulu word for "power": since her 2015 activism debut in the form of YouTube video “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows”, which explored cultural appropriation, she has become a vocal spokesperson for black, queer and gender-nonconforming youth. Stenberg has a list of additional skills (director, writer comic book artist, musician, model) that often seem to surpass what should be possible at her age, and is starring in three major films in 2017 – including Stella Meghie’s Everything Everything, and Amma Asante’s Where Hands Touch, which tells the story of a biracial teenager growing up in Nazi Germany.
Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff