[Curiosities] The Luminaries: 25 women pushing boundaries and accomplishing extraordinary feats

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Insider has compiled a list of 25 Luminaries — women pushing boundaries in their personal and professional lives.
The list includes women who work in music, travel, food, fashion, art, beauty, and wellness.
Honorees include the first female captain of a mega-cruise ship, a "Top Chef" winner, and the founder of Black Owned Everything, a marketplace that showcases Black businesses and designers.
Kate McCue is the first female captain of a mega-cruise ship. Zerina Akers is a stylist for Beyoncé and the founder of Black Owned Everything, a marketplace that showcases Black designers and businesses. After Karen Darke was paralyzed in a cliff-climbing accident, she has hand-biked the length of Japan, sit-skied across the Greenland ice cap, and climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. 

These are some of the 25 women featured on Insider's list of Luminaries who are pushing boundaries and accomplishing extraordinary feats in music, travel, fashion, food, art, beauty, and wellness.

Read on to meet the Luminaries who are inspiring us in 2020.

Kellee Edwards is a modern-day adventurer: The pilot, scuba diver, and mountain climber is the first Black woman to host an adventure series on the Travel Channel.
Kellee Edwards
Kellee Edwards
Kellee Edwards, a pilot, explorer, and the first Black woman to host an adventure series on the Travel Channel, was once called "The Most Interesting Woman in the World" by Outside magazine.

She's visited over 50 countries, many of them solo, and has done everything from climbing an active volcano in Guatemala to flying herself to Alaska's Aleutian Chain.

You'd think a pandemic might slow her down, but she's busier than ever, with multiple TV shows on the way, a product line, and a children's book series in the works. Her travel and leisure podcast "Let's Go Together" has also been renewed for another 12 episodes.

Edwards says it helps that the type of travel she's used to is already socially distant and she can simply fly herself to these remote spots, no airport or runway needed.

She attributes her success to seeing something that was missing in the world and making it her own.

"I tell people all the time, 'What do you do that I can't do? That most people can't do? That's your thing,'" she told Insider, advising people to forge their own paths rather than follow hers.

"I decided I'm not going to prove to anyone that I belong where I belong. I'm going to show them through my actions that I have the right to be there," she said.

To her, it all comes down to a willingness to be uncomfortable.  

"I don't want people to keep just going with the flow; I want them going against the current," she said. "I really wish that people wouldn't be so shortsighted and shortchange their own lives by never learning what they're made of. I don't think as a society that we reached our peak because we don't know how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable."