Thomas Sanders

Thomas Sanders (born April 24, 1989) is an American singer, actor, scriptwriter and internet personality made famous by Vine and YouTube.

He has had a career in musical theatre in his hometown in Florida since he was a teenager, performing since 2006 in Gainesville and Orlando, Florida, and starring in a tour through 17 cities in the US and Canada with his own stage musical, Ultimate Storytime, based on his Vine series.

Later, Sanders combined his studies at the University of Florida with community theater, joining the Gainesville Community Playhouse from 2006 until 2015.

Sanders opened his official YouTube account on March 15, 2009.

After amassing a following through Vine, he started publishing more frequently through YouTube.

When he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering in 2011, he subsequently combined his daytime job as a manufacturing engineer at a pharmaceutical development company in Alachua with his night-time job in theater, until his success on Vine prompted him to leave that first job and focus on Vine and theater.

He is best known for his YouTube channel and Vine career, which lasted from April 2013 until the social media site was shut down by Twitter in 2017.

After the shutdown of Vine, he continued releasing videos across various social media sites.

Sanders creates long videos on YouTube, while simultaneously posting shorter videos in the style of Vine to Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter.

His work consists of comedy sketches, pranks, stories, singing and civil rights activism.

Sanders is mainly known for the Vine series Narrating People's Lives, also known as Storytime, for the prank series “Disney Pranks with friends,” and on YouTube for the series Sanders Sides.

He reached over 7.4 billion loops and 8.3 million followers on Vine, making his career one of the most successful in this social media platform's short history.

his account on TikTok has a following of 10 million followers.

On YouTube, he has two channels, "Thomas Sanders" and "Thomas Sanders and Friends", although the second channel stopped adding new content in November 2021 and has been discontinued ever since.

his main channel has over 4.1 million subscribers and his second channel has 379,000 subscribers.

Sanders has won two Shorty Awards and one Streamy Award, for best Viner and best YouTube comedian, and has been nominated for a Teen Choice Award to "Choice Viner" among other recognitions.

As a singer, Sanders has published one EP in 2013, one album in 2016, and several singles from 2017 onwards.

Thomas Sanders made his debut on Vine as "Foster Dawg", named after his first dog, Foster, on April 14, 2013.

An impression of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy in a drive-thru was his first Vine to go viral, leading to continued success on the app.

He later rebranded his channel to "Thomas Sanders".

His channel reached 1 million followers on Vine in October 2013.

His biggest success on Vine was the Narrating People's Lives series, also known as Storytime, where he approached random strangers, comically narrated everyday activities they were doing, and showed their reaction.

Other Vine series he is known for are Disney Pranks with Friends, Pokémon Pranks, Misleading Compliments, and Shoutout Sunday, among others.

Up until 2014, his subscriber count grew at a lower rate, with around 80,000 subscribers at the end of that year.

By April 2015, Sanders' Vine account had over 5 million followers, which made Thomas Sanders the 17th most followed Viner at the time.

On February 24, 2015, Sanders appeared as a guest on The View in a segment featuring Vine stars, where he was interviewed about his popularity on Vine, and one of his Vines was featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in their section Vine after Vine.

Sanders has collaborated with Viners such as Vincent Marcus, Brandon Calvillo and Amymarie Gaertner, and featured cameos and appearances from figures such as Sean Bean, Nicolle Wallace, Stacy London, Nick Pitera (with whom he did a series of Vines, Unexpected Duets), Brizzy Voices, Gabbie Hanna, Tara Strong, E. G. Daily, Jim Cummings, Dan and Phil, Adam Pascal and the main actors from Hamilton, Teen Titans Go! and Steven Universe, among others.

He had his first YouTube collaborations throughout 2015, consisting of pranks, games and challenges.

When Twitter announced that it was closing Vine down at the end of 2016, Sanders announced that he would continue making Vines until the app's last day.

In 2017, he made a guest appearance on the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark and co-hosted a special episode of the Disney XD show Walk the Prank alongside David Lopez.

Sanders was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida.

His great-grandfather on his mother's side was born in Ireland.

His great-grandmother was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, something Sanders called his "ancestral connection with stage".

Sanders' father is a teacher.

Sanders has three brothers named Patrick, Christian, and Shea.

He started singing in public and took his first steps in acting in middle-school at Kanapaha Middle School, located in Gainesville, singing in several choruses and appearing in several school plays.

In his high-school, Buchholz, he started combining acting and singing by doing his first roles in musical plays.

In June 2017, he publicly came out as gay.

When Vine was shut down on January 17, 2017, Sanders had reached 8.3 million followers.

Since that date, his short videos, now known as the Sanders Shorts, are first released on his Instagram, where he has 2.5 million followers.