Teyana Taylor is having one helluva year. Not only has she gone from a budding actress to a bonafide movie superstar in less than three years, but she’s inching closer and closer to the coveted Oscars statuette in March thanks to her role in “One Battle After Another.” But before she gets there, she’s just garnered yet another somewhat rare accomplishment.
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If you don’t know what we’re talking about, then let us be the first to tell you that Taylor has been picked as one of TIME Magazine’s Women of the Year and has the prestigious honor of gracing the cover. As you would expect, she looks drop-dead gorgeous on it. (And as an added bonus, “Abbott Elementary” star Sheryl Lee Ralph was also picked as one of the women.)
But if we’re being completely honest, this moment is just another thing that’s helping to cement Taylor’s staying power in the industry. In the last year alone, she’s already been nominated for Oscar, won a Golden Globe, won an NAACP Image Award, earned a Grammy nomination for her “comeback” album—and now she’s one of TIME’s Women of the Year, a feat that not too many Black actresses can say they’ve accomplished.
After all, the magazine only really started recognizing women on the cover in a designated big way 2020, when they dropped their “100 Women of the Year,—21 of which were Black women with their own covers. Since then, a handful of other Black women have been selected as Women of the Year, including: Kerry Washington, Allyson Felix, Amanda Gorman, Sherrilyn Ifill, Jennie Joseph, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Angela Bassett, Quinta Brunson, Ramala Ali, A’ja Wilson, Jordan Chiles, Raquel Willis, Fatou Baldeh, and Claire Babineaux-Fontenot.
But given Taylor’s exceptional year, this honor is more than fitting. And to think, her impressive trajectory may not have panned out this way had she listened to naysayers who tried to dissuade her from pursuing acting.
“Everybody told me it was dumb. And I was like, ‘No, I am going to be a great actress. One day, I am going to be a great director,’” she told the outlet.
While her big movie directorial debut may be a ways off for now, it’s clear her acting has made waves in Hollywood. And even if she doesn’t go home with the gold at the 2026 Oscars, she’s already a winner in our book and her own.
“Even if I go home empty-handed, I have won,” she said. “We’re young, we’re blessed, we’re being celebrated—this is the time to be happy and to have fun with it, especially in a space that some people take so serious, and some people are cold, some people are robotic.”
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