Los Angeles has always been a city where the work gets made in garages, back rooms, and rented studios long before anybody outside the zip code notices. Curry Barker turned a $750,000 horror budget into a global box office phenomenon worth more than $400 million. Zamar Velez went from shooting his friends in Orange County to photographing Issa Rae, Pharrell, and Tyler, the Creator. Jon Yao took home the 2025 James Beard Award for Best Chef: California, then earned Kato a second Michelin star this summer. None of that happens in a city that’s coasting.
The 50 names here cut across music, fashion, food, fine art, film, photography, and the businesses built to support all of it. Some are running labels and brands they founded in their early twenties. Some are still the person other people call when a project needs a stylist, a producer, or a fixer who knows which door to knock on. What ties them together is that their next year in Los Angeles is going to move something, whether that’s a room full of fans, a museum wall, or a client list.
This weekend, a lot of them will be doing it at ComplexCon. The festival turns 10 on October 3–4 at the Los Angeles Convention Center and Crypto.com Arena. Several people on this list will be on the floor, from Hellstar debuting its Tupac project to Shane Gonzales bringing Alice Hollywood back to the event where Midnight Studios first made noise. It’s a fitting stage: For a decade, ComplexCon has been where the kind of creatives on this list meet the people who’ve been paying attention all along.
Here are 50 L.A. creatives moving culture forward in 2026.
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