Tavi Gevinson

Tavi Gevinson is an American actress, writer, and magazine editor born on April 21, 1996, in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. Her father, Steve Gevinson, works as a high school English teacher, and her mother, Berit Engen, is a weaver and part-time Hebrew instructor who grew up in Oslo, Norway. Engen converted to Judaism in 2001, and Gevinson and her two older sisters were raised in the Jewish faith, with Gevinson celebrating a Bat Mitzvah. She attended Oak Park and River Forest High School, graduating in 2014.

Gevinson first attracted public attention in 2008, when she launched a fashion blog called Style Rookie at age eleven. The blog featured photographs of Gevinson in distinctive outfits alongside her commentary on fashion trends and drew nearly 30,000 daily readers. Its success led to invitations to attend New York Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week, as well as fashion-related trips to Tokyo and Antwerp funded by Pop magazine. She was commissioned to write for Harper's Bazaar and Barneys, styled a shoot for BlackBook magazine, served as a muse and model for Rodarte's clothing line at Target, and partnered with Borders and Frontiers to design and sell her own line. In 2010, she spoke at a marketing conference in New York and at Idea City, a Canadian counterpart to the TED conference.

By early 2011, Gevinson shifted her focus away from fashion toward broader cultural and feminist topics. That fall, at age fifteen, she founded Rookie, an online magazine written primarily by and for teenage girls. The site was originally conceived as a joint venture with Jane Pratt, but Gevinson retained sole ownership. Ira Glass served as a mentor during the magazine's development. A print edition, Rookie Yearbook One, was published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2012. That same year, Gevinson spoke at TEDxTeen on the representation of women in popular culture and at The Economist's World in 2012 Festival. She also served as a contributing editor at Garage magazine. In November 2018, Gevinson announced the closure of Rookie, citing financial unsustainability.

Gevinson's acting career began with a short film, First Bass, in 2008. She became more visible in 2012, voicing a character in the animated short Cadavar, directed by Jonah Ansell and co-starring Kathy Bates and Christopher Lloyd, in which she sang Neil Young and Pet Shop Boys songs. Also in 2012, she filmed a role in Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said, and appeared on screen in the 2013 documentary The Punk Singer, discussing riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna. In 2014 and 2015, she starred in This Is Our Youth, first in Chicago and then at the Cort Theatre on Broadway. In 2015, she made a guest appearance as Feather McCarthy in the seventh episode of the television series Scream Queens. She returned to Broadway in 2016 to play Mary Warren in Ivo van Hove's production of The Crucible at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and later that year portrayed Anya in The Cherry Orchard at the American Airlines Theatre. Gevinson subsequently starred in the HBO Max series Gossip Girl from 2021 to 2023.

Outside of her entertainment career, Gevinson appeared in a 2012 public service announcement supporting Barack Obama's presidential campaign, in which she mouthed the words to Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" in support of women's rights. She also organized a get-well-soon-card drive for Malala Yousafzai following the Pakistani activist's shooting in October 2012. In 2016, Gevinson recorded a duet with Seth Bogart, singing on "Barely 21" from Bogart's self-titled debut solo album.