Create & Cultivate C&C 100 List

Create & Cultivate

Create & Cultivate, the largest events and media company for women in business, announces the return of its annual C&C 100 List, taking place June 16, 2026. The highly anticipated event honors 100 women who are shaping industries, advancing culture, and redefining leadership across business, media, entertainment, technology, fashion, beauty, sports, and beyond.

Since its launch in 2017, the C&C 100 has spotlighted more than 700 groundbreaking women whose influence continues to shape the future of culture and commerce. This year’s honorees represent a dynamic cross-section of founders, executives, creators, entertainers, athletes, innovators, and industry disruptors spanning generations and stages of success, from rising entrepreneurs to legacy leaders. The event will bring together honorees, founders, executives, creators, tastemakers, and industry leaders for an evening celebrating the women driving innovation, influence, and cultural impact in 2026.

“The C&C 100 has always been about recognizing women who are not just participating in culture, but actively shaping where it’s headed,” said Marina Middleton, CEO of Create & Cultivate. “This year’s class reflects the incredible breadth of female leadership today across industries, platforms, and communities. These women are building businesses, influencing conversations, and creating meaningful impact at scale.”

Middleton told me during our interview that the organization’s mission has not changed since 2017. “Create & Cultivate’s 100 List honors the women who are building, leading, and influencing at scale. They are moving markets, shaping culture, and making decisions that matter. We evolve right alongside them. As they shift, the list shifts. This year spans industries, generations, and stages of success, from first-time founders to legacy leaders, each setting the pace, raising the standard, and moving culture forward. The categories change year to year based on the moves we are seeing in the real world, which is why content creators now sit alongside tech, money, and the founders just getting started. What does not move is the bar. Every woman on this list has earned it by building something real and making an impact inside and outside her respective industry. Ambition is everywhere right now. The women on this list are the ones who put in the work,” she shared.

According to Middleton, the selection process for this year’s honorees is more rigorous than many assume and is not a popularity contest. “We sort the field across categories, from money and tech to beauty, sports and wellness, culinary, and our rising stars. The team starts with hundreds of nominations, and the hardest discipline is resisting the obvious pick. The easiest thing in the world is to hand a spot to someone already on every other list. We are far more interested in the operator who quietly built real revenue, rewrote how her category works, or is two years out from becoming a household name and has not yet been recognized,” she shared. “The qualities that stand out every time are specificity and clarity in how they show up consistently and what they are known for. And almost all of them have a voice that is entirely their own. They did not wait for their industry to tell them what they were allowed to be, and they did not shrink to fit the box society built for them. You can see it across this class. Brittany Snow says the turning point in her career was the moment she stopped trying to be anyone but herself. Golloria George built her platform by refusing to make herself smaller for anyone. Different industries, same refusal. That is what makes a woman impossible to overlook and earns her a spot on this list.”

She continued, “A few patterns are impossible to miss. The first is that the title on the business card no longer means anything. The women on this list are creators, operators, and founders. Nara Smith and Tini turned an audience into food brands. Amber Venz Box turned the way creators get paid into a company. Angel Reese turned a sport into a business that lives well beyond the court. Nobody is staying in one lane, and nobody is apologizing for it. The second thread is biased toward action. Emma Grede says she does not wait for perfect conditions; she moves, and almost every woman here is built the same way. Allison Ellsworth started Poppi before the category existed. Sara Foster will tell you that the right time is a myth. They moved first and figured the rest out in motion. The third is range. This list puts first-time founders on the same page as legacy builders like Jeni Britton Bauer and Alli Webb on purpose, because ambition does not have an age or a stage, and we are seeing this now more than ever.”

The 2026 C&C 100 List spans 10 categories, including Beauty, Fashion, Money, Entertainment, Culinary, Sports & Wellness, Content Creators, Tech, Rising Stars, and All Stars. Notable honorees include Paris Hilton, Emma Grede, Angel Reese, Hayley Williams, Saweetie, Elaine Welteroth, Lucy Guo, Olivia Culpo, Lili Reinhart, Bobbi Althoff, Leah Kateb, Chriselle Lim, Olandria Carthen, among others.

Additional honorees include leaders and creators such as Raissa Gerona, Pia Mance, Danessa Myricks, Monique Rodriguez, Tori Dunlap, Arlan Hamilton, Kristen Kish, Nara Smith, Chiney Ogwumike, Victoria Paris, Tezza Barton, and Ty Haney.

What excites Middleton most about this year's honorees and the impact they're making within their communities, industries, and beyond is the growth potential. “The honorees I am most excited about are the ones who are clearly mid-build, the ones who will be unrecognizable in two years because of what they are doing right now. Monique Rodriguez started mixing products in her kitchen for a community the beauty industry kept ignoring, and built Mielle into a brand that forced that industry to pay attention. Arlan Hamilton looked at who venture capital was funding, decided the whole system was broken, and rebuilt it for the founders everyone else passed on,” she said. “Celebrating women is not optional. When you put a woman on the record with the work to back it up, you make her impossible to ignore. That matters in any year. It matters more right now, when companies are quietly walking back the commitments that were supposed to move women forward and hoping nobody is keeping score.

At the end of the day, celebrating leaders, changemakers, and women is simply good for the economy. Women reinvest up to 90% of what they earn back into their families and communities, so every woman on this list is a multiplier. Her win lands on her kids, her team, and her neighborhood. The more we celebrate her, the more women see themselves in her and build too. That is what the C&C 100 is for.”

According to a recent study, women founders make up 49% of all new businesses per the latest data, marking the highest rate in the past five years. C&C 2026 honoree Arlan Hamilton said she’s “grateful and honored” to be recognized by the organization this year. “I’m also still very much in motion. So this encourages me to keep going,” Hamilton shared. She believes the current state of women’s entrepreneurship is in a really interesting place. “On one hand, women are building incredible businesses with fewer resources, more creativity, and more resilience than ever. I’m seeing women use AI, content, community, and digital tools to move faster and reach people directly. That part is exciting, but at the same time, the old barriers have not magically disappeared. Access to capital is still uneven. Access to the right rooms is still uneven. And women, especially Black and Brown women, are still often expected to prove more with less. The progress is real, but it’s not complete. Women are not waiting around anymore. We’re building anyway. But the systems around us still need to catch up,” she said.

For Hamilton, the work has always been about expanding who gets represented and who gets access. “When I started Backstage Capital, I wasn’t just trying to invest in companies. I was trying to challenge the idea of who venture capital was for, who “looked” like a

founder, and who deserved a real shot. I’m still doing that, but in different ways now. Sometimes that means investing. Sometimes it means teaching. Sometimes it’s helping founders understand that venture capital is one path, but it’s not the only path. I care a lot about helping people build leverage. That could be through capital, but it could also be through revenue, audience, ownership, partnerships, or knowing how to tell your story in a way that people finally understand,” she shared.

Encouraging, honoring, and uplifting women is C&C’s purpose, and Middleton believes it’s not optional. “When you put a woman on the record, with the work to back it, you make her impossible to ignore. That matters in any year. It matters more right now, when companies are quietly walking back the commitments that were supposed to move women forward and hoping nobody is keeping score. At the end of the day, celebrating leaders, changemakers, and women is simply good for the economy. Women reinvest up to 90% of what they earn back into their families and communities, so every woman on this list is a multiplier. Her win lands on her kids, her team, and her neighborhood. The more we celebrate her, the more women see themselves in her and build too. That is what the C&C 100 is for,” she stated.