List of Famous people born in May

David Reynolds Ignatius is an American journalist and novelist. He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. He has written eleven novels, including Body of Lies, which director Ridley Scott adapted into a film. He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and currently Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program. He has received numerous honors, including the Legion of Honor from the French Republic, the Urbino World Press Award from the Italian Republic, and a lifetime achievement award from the International Committee for Foreign Journalism.

Alex Lacamoire is an American musician, arranger, conductor, musical director, music copyist, and orchestrator who has worked on many shows both on and off Broadway. He is the recipient of multiple Tony and Grammy Awards for his work on shows such as In the Heights (2008), Hamilton (2016), and Dear Evan Hansen (2017). Lacamoire was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.

Victor J. Zolfo is a set decorator who has worked in the film industry since the late 1980s. Zolfo won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and the BAFTA Award for Best Production Design for the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, sharing the awards for the film with art director and production designer Donald Graham Burt. He was also part of the 20-person team who won the Art Directors Guild's Excellence in Production Design Award for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Brian Kent Kobilka is an American physiologist and a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He is currently a professor in the department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotechnology company focusing on G protein-coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.

Joel L. Lebowitz is a mathematical physicist widely acknowledged for his outstanding contributions to statistical physics, statistical mechanics and many other fields of Mathematics and Physics.

Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor emerita at Columbia University and Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, served as President of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998.

Mitja Nikisch was a classical pianist and dance band leader, born in Leipzig, Germany on May 21, 1899 and died in Venice, Italy on August 5, 1936.