fbpx

Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu, better known as Burna Boy, has been honoured as one of TIME100 Most Influential People in 2024. The 32-year old Grammy award-winning artist joins the ranks of icons such as American businessman Mark Cuban, popular movie star Taraji Henson, and Thelma Golden, nominated by Michelle Obama.

Burna Boy on TIME100 Influential People List. 

Burna Boy’s nomination came from Angelique Kidjo, a respected colleague and fellow Grammy winner, having clinched the prestigious award five times. Her nomination statement, which secured Burnaboy’s place on the list, reads…

Burna Boy on TIME100
Burna Boy

Ten years ago or so, when young African musicians would come to me for advice, I would tell them, “You don’t need to mimic American artists! The world needs the amazing richness and beauty of our traditional African music and our culture. This land is where most of modern music comes from. This source of inspiration is inexhaustible. Its freshness and its elegance will get the world’s attention for sure.”

Burna Boy has made that vision a global reality. Inspired by the fantastic drums of Nigerian folk music, and studied in the craft of the great African singer-songwriters, he follows in the footsteps of Fela Kuti—the internationally celebrated Afrobeats artist and activist. Burna Boy’s deeply original flow and his signature groove have conquered the world with an impressive series of firsts: in 2023, he became the first African artist to sell out a U.S. stadium, and in 2024, he became the first Afrobeats artist to sing at the Grammys.

He is history in the making. Now a whole generation of young people from the continent is looking up to him. 

Burna Boy is the only Nigerian on the highly covered TIME100 2024 list. 

See the complete list of TIME100 Most Influential People of 2024 across all 6 categories. 

Artists

Dua Lipa

Dev Patel

21 Savage

Alia Bhatt

Jenny Holzer

Colman Domingo

Da’Vine Joy Randolph

Lauren Groff

Jeffrey Wright

Fantasia Barrino

TIME100
Dua Lipa

Leslie Odom Jr.

LaToya Ruby Frazier

Alex Edelman

James McBride

Brooks Headley

Icons

Taraji P. Henson

Kylie Minogue

Elliot Page

Burna Boy

Michael J. Fox

Thelma Golden

Sofia Coppola

Jenni Hermoso

TIME100
Taraji P. Henson

Frank Mugisha

Motaz Azaiza

Sakshi Malik

Mark Cuban

Hayao Miyazaki

Suzanne Simard

Julienne Lusenge

Rosanna Flamer-Caldera

Titans

Patrick Mahomes

Satya Nadella

A’ja Wilson

Kelly Ripa

Jack Antonoff

Thasunda Brown Duckett

Donna Langley

Beth Ford

TIME100
Patrick Mahomes

Wang Chuanfu

Kelley Robinson

Chizuko Ueno

Jesper Brodin

Larry Ellison

Joanne Crevoiserat

Max Verstappen

Leaders

Yulia Navalnaya

Narges Mohammadi

Donald Tusk

William Lai

Greg Abbott

Marina Silva

William Burns

E. Jean Carroll

Rena Lee

Javier Milei

Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos

Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani

Elise Stefanik

Diana Salazar Méndez

Jack Smith

Rachel Goldberg-Polin

TIME100
Yulia Navalnaya

Ajay Banga

Gavin Newsom

William Ruto

Giorgia Meloni

Li Qiang

Jigar Shah

Lauren Blauvelt

Andriy Yermak

Innovators

Jensen Huang

Maya Rudolph

Shawn Fain

Siya Kolisi

Akiko Iwasaki

Ynon Kreiz

Tory Burch

Rachel Hardeman

Katsuhiko Hayashi

Dominique Crenn

TIME100
Jensen Huang

Dave Ricks

Connie Walker

Julie Sweet

Jonathan Anderson

Marina Tabassum

Pioneers

America Ferrera 

Lesley Lokko

Ophelia Dahl

Kennedy Odede

Yoshua Bengio

By Geoffrey Hinton

Asma Khan

Kelly Sawyer Patricof and Norah Weinstein

TIME100
America Ferrera

Priyamvada Natarajan

Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dan Drucker

Sam Tsemberis

Sharon Lavigne

Stuart Orkin

No Comments Yet

Comments are closed