With Chicago’s arts scene back in full force post-COVID, we’re seeing big ideas, fresh collaborations and sizzling new releases from all corners.
Here are 16 breakthrough creatives who stood out this year — all of whom we’ll be watching in 2025. Some are delicious fun. Others wrestle deftly with the world we live in, refusing to shy away from topsy-turvy politics and blistering global conflicts.
Ayanna Woods
Barely in her 30s, Ayanna Woods has built up her resume as a contemporary classical composer, with eminent ensembles such as The Crossing, Chanticleer and Chicago’s own Third Coast Percussion presenting her music. This past spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago staged “FORCE,” a three-act opera set in a prison waiting room that brought together Woods and performer Anna Martine Whitehead. Woods worked as lead composer and music director for the project, which went on to stages in Los Angeles, New York and Portland, Oregon, after its world premiere in Chicago. If something about her seems familiar, you’re not mistaken: Her sister is the globe-touring singer Jamila Woods.
Blacknificent 7
Playing on the iconic 1960 Western “The Magnificent Seven,” this collective of Black composers is pushing the contemporary classical genre forward, individually and collectively. Their impact on the contemporary canon is global at this point, but fortunately for Chicago, its members retain deep connections here. Shawn Okpebholo, whose gutting song cycle “Songs in Flight” will be released on Cedille Records in early 2025, is on the faculty at Wheaton College, while Jessie Montgomery just wrapped a stint as composer in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (Rounding out the collective are Dave Ragland, Joel Thompson, Jasmine Barnes, Damien Geter and Carlos Simon.) The group’s convener is soprano Karen Slack, currently the Lyric Opera’s composer in residence and a force behind the world premiere of “African Queens,” a vocal concert at Ravinia in August that paid tribute to queens lost to history. With contributions from each of the Blacknificent 7, the performance put the artists’ breadth of talent on full display.
Kelly O’Sullivan, Alex Thompson and Keith Kupferer of ‘Ghostlight’
When Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, the co-directors of the 2024 film “Ghostlight,” were thinking about casting their new project, they started close to home, with longtime Chicago theater actor Keith Kupferer. O’Sullivan, who also wrote the movie, is a former local theater actor; in 2014, she starred with Kupferer in “The Humans,” a critically acclaimed play by American Theater Company that won a Tony for its New York run after leaving Chicago. Nearly the entire cast of “Ghostlight” came from the Chicago theater scene, including Kupferer’s daughter, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, and his wife, Tara Mallen, the founder of Rivendell Theatre. The movie, released by IFC Films, won awards on the festival circuit and is now streaming on multiple major platforms, including Amazon Prime Video and AMC+.
Jon Michael Hill
The youngest actor to ever be invited to join Steppenwolf Theatre’s ensemble, this Waukegan native has gone from stage to TV and back again. Even amid a steady and stellar career, 2024 was a standout year for Jon Michael Hill, who portrayed the young photographer at the heart of the world-premiere new work “Purpose” at Steppenwolf this spring. The family drama by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (“Appropriate”) is now headed to Broadway; in New York, Hill will reprise his role as the artistic son in a prominent Black family embroiled in the ultimate theater: American politics.
Tova Wolff and Laura Winters
Director Tova Wolff cofounded Refracted Theatre Company in New York before moving it to her native Chicago during the pandemic. She envisioned a theater company that asked tough questions — and that’s what happened this year, when she staged the world premiere of “Coronation” by the playwright Laura Winters. In a future where women still can’t be president, a frustrated group creates a new branch of government: a monarchy. The real-life saga of American politics, including President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 election, forced rewrites. But the play successfully opened in the final sprint of the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. In the days after Trump’s victory, the production held post-show talkbacks that became a conversational space for Chicagoans to talk about gender, politics and the next four years.
Jake Troyli
A former Division 1 basketball player, this up-and-coming visual artist landed a major commission this year on Chicago’s West Side, delivering a mural tied to the city’s star turn hosting the Democratic National Convention. The 30-foot-tall work, which depicts a basketball sneaker–clad artist climbing the ladder of possibility, was commissioned by SkyArt, an arts nonprofit that anchors a new neighborhood arts corridor. This year, Troyli’s work was featured in group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; a solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago currently runs until Jan. 11.
Klaus Mäkelä
Our city’s collective fascination with this millennial successor to Riccardo Muti started this spring, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced he’d been tapped as the youngest maestro in its history. The young Finnish conductor is not officially taking the baton until September 2027, but the appointment is bringing him to town more often, including for a series of concerts this coming spring. Still in his 20s, Mäkelä already heads orchestras in Oslo and Paris. As for why he said yes to Chicago, he said in April, “I fell in love with the orchestra. And I fell in love with the orchestra’s appetite for excellence and their brilliance.”
Omar Apollo
Growing up in Indiana, Apollo had something to prove to his Mexican father: that he could sing. He for sure can — and his music took him all over the world this year, from Coachella to the Grammys to opening for SZA on her “SOS” tour. But Apollo’s ambitions also took off beyond music, with a small role in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer.” It may have been Apollo’s first feature-length film, but it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is making the rounds this awards season for lead actor Daniel Craig. “I’ve always wanted to act,” Apollo said in August. The sky’s the limit with what’s next.
Miriam Paz
Chicago DJ Miriam Paz went from being the only woman DJ at Sueños Music Festival three years ago to throwing a giant sold-out “girls only” party there in 2024. This year, Chicago’s largest event highlighting Latino music featured more female-identifying artists than before, and Paz’s Saturday afternoon set with her all-female DJ collective Sorry Papi — billed as the world’s largest touring all-girl reggaeton party — drew a major crowd. “I’ve been in the industry for quite some time,” Paz said in May, a few days before Sueños. “Like many women who indulge in the nightlife and just want to go out, have fun with their girls or whoever they decide to go out with, there’s always that constant struggle of feeling safe.”
Isaiah Collier
Isaiah Collier’s 2024 album, “The World Is on Fire,” pulls no punches — but it also imagines the future he’d like to see. A swan-song project with his band The Chosen Few, the saxophonist and South Side native intersperses his compositions with news clippings and spoken-word verses, dropping listeners — whether they like it or not — right back into the chaotic early 2020s. You can’t miss Collier’s commentary on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, global warming and the modern-day “lynchings” of Black Americans such as George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. It’s a young artist’s blistering response to the world around him, yet it’s far from hopeless. “At the end of the day,” Collier said in October, “art remains.”
Kia Smith
What started in 2017 as a pickup dance group of friends and friends-of-friends has turned into Kia Smith’s South Chicago Dance Theatre: a blazing presence in Chicago’s contemporary dance scene, through new work, collaboration and sheer force of personality. Smith has a knack for commissioning new works — at a spring performance at the Auditorium Theatre, she presented six world premieres from a global list of artists, including Taiwanese choreographer Tsai Hsi Hung. In the Chicago tradition, Smith makes no small plans: She notoriously has a 75-year vision for the company that includes a “Choreographic Diplomacy Initiative” to spark collaborations around the globe.
Finom’s Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart
Individually, Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart are connected to a long list of musical projects around town, from albums to sound installations. But some of their strongest work is together, as the duo Finom. Jeff Tweedy produced their May album, “Not God,” which delivers a wildly inventive soundscape reflective of the city’s music scenes, past and present. Marked by songs that start off pedestrian and then brilliantly swell, the album was one of our favorite local full-length releases of the year. The sound defies categorization, something Cunningham said she has come to embrace. “People never know quite where to put us,” she said in May. “That also means the algorithms don’t know what to do with us either. That can be frustrating — but on the other hand, it’s awesome.”