Thomas Foly Sanders is an American singer, musician, actor, voice actor, scriptwriter, and internet personality made famous by Vine and YouTube. 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. As of April 2023, his account on TikTok has a following of 10 million followers. On YouTube, he has two channels, "Thomas Sanders" and "Thomas Sanders and Friends", with the latter being discontinued in November 2021. As of August 2023, 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. 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. For Disney, he made a guest appearance on the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark in 2017 and co-hosted a special episode of the Disney XD show Walk the Prank alongside David Lopez. He has worked as a voice actor in the movie Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe, and in the TV cartoon shows Hamster & Gretel and Kabu.
Sanders was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida. Sanders' father is a teacher. He has three brothers named Patrick, Christian, and Shea.[citation needed] 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 to the stage". Sanders started singing and acting at Kanapaha Middle School in Gainesville, where he was part of the school's choir and theater club. At Buchholz High School, he started doing musical plays. Later, Sanders combined his studies at the University of Florida with community theater, joining the Gainesville Community Playhouse from 2006 until 2015. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 2011, he combined his daytime job as a manufacturing engineer at a pharmaceutical development company in Alachua with his night-time job in theater.[citation needed] When he became successful on Vine, he left his job as an engineer to pursue Vine and theater full-time. In June 2017, he publicly came out as gay.
