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Angelica Nwandu          

Founder of The Shade Room

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.

News


How I Started My Own Company Using My Instagram Account
When she came up with the idea for The Shade Room (TSR) in 2014, a news site that follows trending stories and the actions of celebrities in real time, Angelica Nwandu was broke, unemployed, and had no blogging experience. But she believed in her idea. Nwandu started an Instagram account and began to anonymously blog about celebrities.
How Angie Nwandu leveraged Instagram to build The Shade Room into a media empire
Let’s play a quick game. Guess which one of these Instagram accounts has the most followers: CNN, TMZ, BuzzFeed, The Shade Room. Answer: The Shade Room, which — at 22m followers — has an audience nearly as big as the other 3 combined.
How The Shade Room Founder Angelica Nwandu Went From the Brink of Eviction to Collaborating With Issa Rae
Angelica Nwandu didn’t always have a way with words. Nwandu, who grew up in Los Angeles’ foster care system, performed at poetry slams with the nonprofit Peace4Kids and recalls that her first piece “was pretty much a poem that said, ‘Fuck social workers.’”
Meet Angelica Nwandu: Founder Of The Shade Room, Instagram’s 3rd Most Engaged Profile
Traditional forms of media distribution, such as newspapers and TV, have gained much competition online, with blogs and social media platforms rising in popularity. This shift has created opportunities for entrepreneurs to tackle large, established organisations and launch media careers without possessing a traditional background in journalism. I spoke with Angelica Nwandu, 29, founder and CEO of media company and Instagram’s third most actively-engaged account The Shade Room, whose business is doing just that.

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