List of Famous people born in District of Columbia, United States of America

Joshua Collins Stamberg is an American actor. He was regular cast member in the Lifetime comedy-drama series Drop Dead Diva from 2009 to 2012, and later had recurring roles on Parenthood (2013–14), The Affair (2014–17) and WandaVision (2021).

Solomon Halbert Snyder is an American neuroscientist who has made wide-ranging contributions to neuropharmacology and neurochemistry. He studied at Georgetown University, and has conducted the majority of his research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs, and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1978 for his research on the opioid receptor, and is one of the most highly cited researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences, with the highest h-index in those fields for the years 1983–2002, and then from 2007–2019.

Sam Riegel, occasionally known as Jack Lingo, is an American voice actor, director, and writer. He is a regular cast member of the web series Critical Role, in which he and other fellow voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons.

Rostam Batmanglij, known mononymously as Rostam, is an American producer, songwriter, and composer. He was a founding member of the band Vampire Weekend, whose first three albums he produced. He has been described as one of the greatest pop and indie-rock producers of his generation. Rostam also works as a solo artist and is a member of electro-soul group Discovery. He produced his first number one album when he was 27 years old, Vampire Weekend's Contra.

Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist and short story writer. Born in Washington, DC, he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

David Jonathan Gross is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. Gross is the Chancellor's Chair Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and was formerly the KITP director and holder of their Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics. He is also a faculty member in the UCSB Physics Department and is currently affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Lauro Escorel Filho, most known as Lauro Escorel, is an American-born Brazilian cinematographer and film director. He was born during his father, a Ministry of External Relations, stay in Washington, DC. He first worked as an assistant to Dib Lutfi and Affonso Beato, and made his debut in 1971 on Leon Hirszman's São Bernardo, which won Gramado Film Festival Best Cinematography Award. He directed the short film Libertários, winner of Margarida de Prata Award from the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil, in 1976. In 1978, he would win again the Gramado Film Festival Best Cinematography Award for his work on Héctor Babenco's Lúcio Flávio, o Passageiro da Agonia. His first feature film, Sonho sem Fim, won the Jury Special Award at the 1986 Gramado Film Festival. Ironweed (1987), another Babenco's film, would make him more known internationally.

Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic and executive. He is currently the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he is also the Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism. A staff writer for The New Yorker, he served as the president and CEO of the New America think tank from 2007 to 2012.

Ian Thomas Garner MacKaye is an American singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer. Active since 1979, he is best known as the co-founder and owner of Dischord Records, a Washington, D.C.-based independent record label and the frontman of hardcore punk band Minor Threat and post-hardcore band Fugazi. MacKaye was also the frontman for the short-lived bands The Teen Idles, Embrace and Pailhead, a collaboration with the band Ministry. MacKaye is a member of The Evens, a two-piece indie rock group he formed with his wife Amy Farina in 2001 and in 2018 formed the band Coriky with Farina and his Fugazi band mate Joe Lally.

Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.