Shane Lee Yaw, known professionally as Shane Dawson, is an American YouTuber, actor, writer, comedian, director, make-up artist, and musician. He was one of the first people to rise to fame on YouTube, and has since maintained an online presence.
In 2008, when Dawson was nineteen years old, he joined YouTube and began making videos. He rose to fame on the site, garnering over half a billion views by 2010. Most of his early work consisted of sketch comedy videos, where Dawson would play original characters, impersonate celebrities and make light of popular culture.
Dawson has released two New York Times best-selling books, I Hate Myselfie (2015) and It Gets Worse (2016). Since 2017, he maintains one active channel, Shane, which is one of the 100 most-subscribed YouTube channels with 23 million subscribers and over 5 billion views.
In 2019, he created the documentary series The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star that follows Jeffree Star, founder and CEO of Jeffree Star Cosmetics. In the series, Dawson and Star work together to design a makeup collection called The Conspiracy Collection.[1]
The collection was so successful that the traffic for its initial launch was so enormous that it crashed Shopify for several hours.[2]
In July of 2015, Shane Dawson came out on his YouTube channel. In the videos, he discusses a lot of the doubts and fears that so many bi people experience.