Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda, born January 16, 1980, in New York City, is an American actor, composer, lyricist, book writer, rapper, singer, filmmaker, and librettist. He is of predominantly Puerto Rican descent and also has distant Mexican, English, and African American ancestry. His father, Luis Miranda Jr., is a political consultant, and his mother, Luz Towns-Miranda, is a clinical psychologist. Miranda grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, was raised Catholic, and spent at least one month each year during his childhood and teens with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. He has one older sister, Luz, who serves as Chief Financial Officer of the MirRam Group. His parents chose the name "Lin-Manuel" from a poem about the Vietnam War by Puerto Rican writer José Manuel Torres Santiago, titled "Nana roja para mi hijo Lin Manuel."

Miranda attended Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School, where he began writing musicals. Among his classmates was journalist Chris Hayes, who directed Miranda in a school production described as a 20-minute musical centered on a maniacal fetal pig from a biology class nightmare. Rapper Immortal Technique was also a classmate, and though he had bullied Miranda, the two later became friends. Miranda wrote the earliest draft of In the Heights during his sophomore year at Wesleyan University in 1999, after which the show was accepted by the university's student theater company, Second Stage. He added freestyle rap and salsa numbers before its premiere there that same year. At Wesleyan, Miranda also wrote and directed several other musicals and acted in productions ranging from musicals to Shakespeare, graduating in 2002.

Miranda made his Broadway debut in 2008 as the composer, lyricist, and star of In the Heights, a musical for which playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book. The show had been revised beginning in 2002 with director Thomas Kail and John Buffalo Mailer, premiered in Connecticut in 2005, and opened off-Broadway at the 37 Arts Theater in 2007 before reaching Broadway in March 2008. In the Heights was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won four, including Best Musical and Best Original Score, and also won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Miranda's portrayal of the lead character Usnavi earned him a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. He left the Broadway cast on February 15, 2009, later reprising the role during the national tour's Los Angeles engagement from June 23 to July 25, 2010, and again rejoining the production from December 25, 2010, until it closed on January 9, 2011, after 1,185 regular performances. The musical was subsequently adapted as a 2021 film.

During the same period, Miranda contributed Spanish-language dialogue and worked with Stephen Sondheim to translate song lyrics into Spanish for the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story. In 2008, composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz invited Miranda to contribute two new songs to a revised version of the 1978 musical Working, which opened in May 2008 at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida. Miranda also worked during these years as an English teacher at his former high school, wrote for the Manhattan Times as a columnist and restaurant critic, and composed music for commercials.

In 2003, Miranda co-founded Freestyle Love Supreme, a hip-hop improv group that has toured the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as well as the Aspen, Melbourne, and Montreal Comedy festivals. The group created a limited television series for Pivot in 2014 and made its Broadway debut on October 2, 2019, at the Booth Theatre. Miranda co-wrote the music and lyrics for Bring It On: The Musical alongside Tom Kitt and Amanda Green. The show premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in January 2011, began a national tour on October 30, 2011, and played a limited Broadway engagement at the St. James Theatre, opening officially on August 1, 2012, and closing on December 30, 2012. It received Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Choreography. In February 2012, Miranda appeared in an Encores! staged concert of Merrily We Roll Along at New York City Center, playing the role of Charley. In June 2014, he starred in an Encores! revival of Jonathan Larson's Tick, Tick... Boom!, directed by Oliver Butler under the artistic direction of Jeanine Tesori. That same month, Miranda wrote the music and lyrics for the one-act musical 21 Chump Street and performed as its narrator at a single performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on June 7, 2014, which was later broadcast on NPR's This American Life. He and Tom Kitt also co-wrote the opening number "Bigger!" for the 67th Tony Awards in 2014, earning an Emmy for the song.

While on vacation in 2008, Miranda read Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, which inspired him to develop what would become Hamilton. He returned to Broadway in 2015 as the show's composer, lyricist, book writer, and star. Hamilton was nominated for a record 16 Tony Awards and won 11, including Miranda's Tony for Best Book of a Musical and a second Tony for Best Original Score, both in 2016. The production also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The cast recording spent 10 weeks atop Billboard's Top Rap Albums chart and ranked as the eleventh-biggest album of the 2010s. Miranda received a Tony Award Special Award in 2020 in connection with his Broadway work.

Beyond the stage, Miranda has been a frequent collaborator with the Walt Disney Company, writing original songs for the animated films Moana, Vivo, and Encanto. He received Academy Award nominations for "How Far I'll Go" from Moana and "Dos Oruguitas" from Encanto. The Encanto song "We Don't Talk About Bruno" became his first number-one single on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles charts. Miranda starred as Jack in the 2018 musical fantasy film Mary Poppins Returns, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination. He also received Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nominations for his performance in the Disney+ live stage recording of Hamilton, released in 2020. Miranda made his feature film directorial debut with Tick, Tick... Boom!, an adaptation of Jonathan Larson's musical.

His television credits include recurring roles on The Electric Company from 2009 to 2010 and His Dark Materials from 2019 to 2022. Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live in 2016 and had a guest role on Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2018. Across his career, his accolades include a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, three Tony Awards, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Emmy Awards, five Grammy Awards, and a Kennedy Center Honor received in 2018. Miranda has also been politically active on behalf of Puerto Rico, meeting with politicians in 2016 to advocate for debt relief and raising funds for rescue and disaster relief efforts following Hurricane Maria in 2017.