From Nobel laureates to Drake
Famous People From Toronto
A city that produced a Nobel Prize-winning medical discovery and a generation-defining rap career has a longer list of notable natives than its music-scene reputation alone suggests.
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Toronto's cultural export list runs a lot deeper than the music industry, though the music industry is genuinely where it's most dominant. A sample of who actually comes from here.
Music
Drake (Aubrey Graham) is the most globally recognizable name to come out of the city's music scene, and did more than any single figure to popularize Toronto's own slang and nicknames worldwide — see our nicknames guide for the direct line from his work to "The Six." The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye), who grew up in Scarborough and got his start in Parkdale, and electronic producer deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) round out a music scene detailed further in our media and entertainment guide.
Literature
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and one of the most internationally recognized living Canadian writers, has lived and worked in Toronto for most of her career.
Science
Sir Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 and won the Nobel Prize in 1923, is arguably the most consequential name on this list by real-world impact — see our full medical history guide. More recently, U of T computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has become one of the most cited researchers behind the current era of AI, discussed further in our tech scene guide.
Business and architecture
Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-founders of Research In Motion (BlackBerry), came out of the same wider southern-Ontario tech corridor as Toronto's current startup scene. Architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, was born and raised in Toronto — and returned decades later to design the current Art Gallery of Ontario building, covered in our art guide.
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Sources
- Wikipedia — List of people from Toronto
- Heritage U of T — Discovery of Insulin at University of Toronto