I made a list with more than 350 names of Chinese people: http://beta.skritter.cn/vocab/list?list=115425147
(Whether one really should know? I leave this to your own judgement.)
It has various categories, politicians, history, actors/actresses, TV, business people, sport, contemporary Fine Art, etc. I wonna share this list, in case other skritterers are interested in it.
Every entry contains a picture of the person and also a brief description. The description is not representative for this person - it is too short anyway -, but it contains, where possible, some uniqueness to serve as a mnemonic. The lists are by far not "complete", e.g. for literature many important entries are missing. But I hope, that some others have an interest in the lists and can help to develop it further. If you are interested in movies, then you can find under actors/actresses/directors in the mnemonics some relevant movie titles in English and Chinese. Most of the descriptions are coming from Wikipedia, so it might be, that the one or other is outdated already. I also will not systematically check in the future about any update, so if you find an outdated entry, feel free to update it.
Warning: it's very hard to learn names of people, one doesn't know. In addition, the names contain, as usually, a lot of rare used characters. Therefore, I recommend to be very selective, when you want to add names to your study list. You can add lists and then ban those names, where you don't know the person and then over time slowly unban, whenever you come across such person.
You might wonder, why I did it. In the beginning, I was especially interested in movies. However, when talking to people from mainland, most of them didn't know names even like Andy Lau, Michelle Yeoh or Chow Yun-fat, they only know their Chinese names. Also, when standing in a DVD shop, I didn't know their Chinese names and couldn't read the cover nor ask the people in the shop, as they didn't understand the Englich names. In addition, I'm interested in history and are reading quite some books about it, recently also Wu Han's book about Ming Dynasty in Chinese. A lot of names are popping up there, which I didn't understand, didn't know the characters and couldn't remember. So I decided to extend the lists. I'm also interested in contemporary art, but couldn't remember the names of the artists and what kind of paintings they are standing for. So I put some samples of their work also into it.
If you want to extend a list, feel free to do so, you can send me an according picture by mail and I will put it on my server - if you want.
Have fun!

wow, cheers!

Fantastic!

There must be a flaw in the system.

I just studied 苗圃, translation: nursery (of young plants).

Instead of my usual definition I got the image of some young woman, apparently also called 苗圃. Part of your list?

I'd prefer the English translation.

My apologies if this is not related to your list.

Foo, sorry, yes I'd overwritten this, my apology. I have put it back, so that now both definitions are there, is this OK for?

And if there is a collision, you can always delete the proper name and image part for your custom definition if you don't want to learn it.

I'm loving the list and have already added a bunch of people from it that I'd really have benefitted from knowing a long time ago. I'll second the point to not add the entire thing, though--there are a lot of people in there that will be hard to remember if you don't know them in the first place.

Wont be studying it myself (don't know who most are), but it's a very impressive list, and you've clearly put a huge amount of effort in!