List of Famous people born in California, United States of America

Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York.

Jonathan Alfred Clawson Redford is an American composer, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor. He is also the author of Welcome All Wonders: A Composer's Journey.

Irving Asher (1903–1985) was an American film producer. Born in San Francisco in September 1903, he began his film production career in Hollywood in 1919. After joining the staff of Warner Brothers he was sent over to England as the managing director of their subsidiary Teddington Studios in Middlesex in the mid 1930s. Flynn played his first significant part as the lead in the now-lost Murder at Monte Carlo (1935), which was produced by Asher. Asher went on to join Alexander Korda's London Film Productions where he worked on the epic The Four Feathers (1939). Subsequently he returned to Hollywood to work as a producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he earned his only Academy Award nomination for the 1941 Greer Garson film Blossoms in the Dust.

Grand Lee Bush is an American actor of stage, television and major motion pictures.

Richard Sakai is an American television and film producer. He is best known for his work on the animated sitcom The Simpsons, for which he is one of the original producers. In 1997, Sakai was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture for his work on the film Jerry Maguire (1996).

Ronald Mark Evans is an American Biologist, Professor and Head of the Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Dr. Ronald M. Evans is known for his original discoveries of nuclear hormone receptors (NR), a special class of transcriptional factor, and the elucidation of their universal mechanism of action, a process that governs how lipophilic hormones and drugs regulate virtually every developmental and metabolic pathway in animals and humans. Nowadays, NRs are among the most widely investigated group of pharmaceutical targets in the world, already yielding benefits in drug discovery for cancer, muscular dystrophies, osteoporosis, type II diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases. His current research focuses on the function of nuclear hormone signaling and their function in metabolism and cancer.

Gary Snyder is an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet, he is also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist with anarchoprimitivist leanings. He has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.

Leslie Iwerks is an American producer, director, and writer. She is daughter of Disney Legend Don Iwerks and granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, the animator and co-creator of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. She has directed films including Recycled Life which was nominated for an Academy Award and The Pixar Story which was nominated for an Emmy for best nonfiction special.

Edith Elura Tilton Penrose was an American-born British economist whose best known work is The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, which describes the ways which firms grow and how fast they do. Writing in The Independent, the economist Sir Alec Cairncross stated that the book brought Dr. Penrose "instant recognition as a creative thinker, and its importance to the analysis of the job of management has been increasingly realized".