Angelica Nwandu

Angelica Nwandu is the founder of the Shade Room, an Instagram-based media company focused on celebrity gossip launched in March of 2014 that now exceeds 24 million followers. Nwandu avoided the typical blog format in favor of publishing full-length stories strictly on Instagram and found Instagram suited to her vision for The Shade Room due to its image-based format. The site has since branched out into covering politics and focusing on Black culture news. Serving viral posts daily, Nwandu and her company offer a range of content from breaking headlines, exclusives and feel-good posts (TSR Positive Images, Morning Inspiration, Daddy Duties [showing men that are spending time with their children], etc.) for an unmatched balance of entertainment and enlightenment. The Shade Room has over 25 million subscribers, or "Roomates," across all platforms. In 2016, Forbes named Nwandu to its 30 Under 30 list, saying she "revolutionized celebrity gossip" with the founding of the Shade Room and the New York Times dubbed The Shade Room "The TMZ of Instagram." Nwandu was dubbed "The Oprah of our generation" by Refinery29 and a "celebrity culture savant" by Complex.

Nwandu has an accounting degree from Loyola Marymount University and began her career at an accounting firm, but left to pursue her dreams of being a writer. She quickly became a Sundance fellow and Time Warner HBO fellow in 2014 and was selected for the January 2014 Screenwriters Lab. The project, developed with co-writer Jordana Spiro, is called "Night Comes On." It premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator award.