21st-century American women

Valerie Hegarty (born 1967) is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, trompe l’oeil states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances (e.g., a seascape pierced by harpoons, a still life of food being eaten by crows). Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets, romantic conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation. Sculpture critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay."Hegarty has exhibited at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and Artists Space. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. Her work belongs to institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. She is based between New York City and Sullivan County, New York.

Margaret O'Rene Ryan (August 28, 1924 – October 30, 2004) was an American dancer and actress, best known for starring in a series of movie musicals at Universal Pictures with Donald O'Connor and Gloria Jean.

Sylvia Morales (born 1943 in Phoenix, Arizona) is an American film director, writer, producer, and editor. Morales is recognized as one of the first female Mexican-American filmmakers to have established a Latino cinema. In her filmmaking career, Morales has been nationally recognized winning awards for film and video documentary on topics ranging from the farm workers struggle to the music of Los Lobos.While the majority of her work is in the documentary film genre, she has also done work for the mass media television. She has also published essays and photographs on Latina and feminist issues. Sylvia Morales has lectured and taught in different Universities throughout Southern California. Morales' work is characterized by strong documentaries that portray the Latino community. She also has work that covers feminist issues in the Chicano community.

Grete Sultan (born Johanna Margarete Sultan) (June 21, 1906 – June 26, 2005) was a German-American pianist.

Jayne Meadows (born Jane Cotter; September 27, 1919 – April 26, 2015) was an American stage, film and television actress, as well as an author and lecturer. She was nominated for three Emmy Awards during her career and was the elder sister of actress and memoirist Audrey Meadows as well as the wife of original Tonight Show host Steve Allen.

Shirley Ann Richards (13 December 1917 – 25 August 2006) was an Australian actress and author who achieved notability in a series of 1930s Australian films for Ken G. Hall before moving to the United States, where she continued her career as a film actress, mainly as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer starlet. Her best known performances were in It Isn't Done (1937), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938), An American Romance (1944), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). In the 1930s, she was the only Australian actor under a long-term contract to a film studio, Cinesound Productions. She subsequently became a lecturer and poet.

Helen Sanger (September 21, 1923 – July 30, 2020) served as the fifth chief librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library and the institution's first Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, a position inaugurated in 1990.

Guadalupe Natalia Tovar Sullivan (27 July 1910 – 12 November 2016), known professionally as Lupita Tovar, was a Mexican-American actress best known for her starring role in the 1931 Spanish-language version of Drácula, filmed in Los Angeles by Universal Pictures at night using the same sets as the Bela Lugosi version, but with a different cast and director. She also starred in the 1932 film Santa, one of the first Mexican sound films, and one of the first commercial Spanish-language sound films. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living actress and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Maclovia Ruiz Mailer (11 September 1910 – 31 December 2005) was a Mexican-American dancer in the 1930s with the San Francisco Ballet. She also had the lead role in a piece choreographed by George Balanchine for the 1936 production of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera House.Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in Mexico, Ruiz was the eldest of three daughters. She moved with her family to San Francisco in 1914, arriving by the S.S. Peru. She was taught folk dancing by her father. She would perform in neighborhood clubs, but local dance schools discriminated against her because of her skin color and ethnic background. At the age of 10, she finally gained acceptance into the Peters Wright Dance School, where she studied interpretive dance while performing on the vaudeville circuit outside of class.When she was 23, she gained entry to the San Francisco Ballet. She went on to perform with the Metropolitan Opera Company and Balanchine's American Ballet Company. She also danced in Samuel Goldwyn's 1938 movie musical extravaganza, The Goldwyn Follies. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945.Throughout her career, Ruiz continued dancing in nightclubs, performing flamenco throughout Spain and South America. Ruiz continued to dance well into her 70s, teaching ballroom and Spanish dance and offering movement classes to the elderly and the disabled.

Margarita "Mago" Orona Gándara (February 8, 1929 – February 18, 2018) was a Chicana artist. She is known for her murals which can be seen throughout El Paso, Texas and in Ciudad Juárez.