The biggest breakout stars of 2019

New York

DARING, defiant and unwilling to be watered down, the stars who closed out the year on top shared a similar mentality: break rules, break through. Here are the top performers from across genres who shook up their scenes.

Masters of self-marketing who were relative unknowns before 2019, these four artists - Lizzo, 31; Lil Nas X, 20; Billie Eilish, 18; and Rosalía, 26 - leveraged social media platforms to broadcast their talent and larger-than-life personalities, and somehow managed to come across wholly authentic at the same time. The result: billions of streams, millions of devoted fans, sold-out concerts, Grammy nominations and many records broken.

"It's just really wonderful to know, and reassuring, that a dirty, pervy, angry, messed up woman can make it to the Emmys," Waller-Bridge, 34, said on stage in September, accepting the first of three Emmys that night for her cutting, filter-free tragicomedy Fleabag, which began in 2013 as a one-woman show. (She was nominated for a fourth Emmy, for outstanding drama series for the spy thriller Killing Eve, which she helped write and create.)

What's next? "I feel like I might scale up a bit," she recently told Vogue. "I feel maybe I want to start thinking more politically, more globally. I don't know, but I can feel something bubbling."

Midway through Waves, about a black Florida family that endures a cataclysmic tragedy, the film's weight shifts onto the shoulders of Emily, a stoic teenage girl played by Russell, 25. In a review of the movie in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, the co-chief film critic, called Russell "an open-faced heartbreaker".

Russell connected with Emily as soon as she read a scene from the movie, she told Elle magazine last month. "I know her, I know this girl," she remembered thinking to herself. "What I love about Waves is the message of healing," Russell said, "and that nobody's perfect."

Shin, a German-Korean photographer born in 1976, was talking about her massive portraits of Kanye West (if you're drawing parallels between the size of these prints and his much discussed ego, you won't be the first).

When she shot West, she wasn't "particularly interested in his comments on slavery, if he liked Trump, or if he did his incoherent tweets," Shin said. "But it changed quickly when I saw people getting really mad." Two of the Kanye portraits and five pieces from her 2016 "Babies" series were among the most talked-about works in 2019.

"Babies" - striking shots of newborns as they crown from their mothers' vaginas - was also among 25 works of art that defined the contemporary age, according to The New York Times Style Magazine.

"Her photographs do not answer any questions," the article said. "Instead, they ask a lot of their audiences."

"It's a one-in-a-million voice," conductor Antonio Pappano said of Davidsen, a soprano.

The show comes on the heels of her first major-label album and her acclaimed debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany over the summer. The Met wasted no time casting her in several shows over the next three seasons.

Casel has been in the field for more than 20 years and inspires people to describe her with words such as illuminating, electric, mesmerising - as Aaron Mattocks, director of programming at the Joyce Theater in New York, put it. It was about time that Casel, 44, got her due, Kourlas wrote.

Other artists who garnered rave reviews include stage actress Ali Stroker, Kenyan-born narrative painter Michael Armitage and ballerina Mira Nadon. NYTIMES