Lin-Manuel Miranda born January 16, 1980, is an American actor, songwriter, rapper, playwright, producer, singer, and film director. He is known for creating the Broadway musicals In the Heights (2005) and Hamilton (2015), and the soundtrack of Disney's Encanto (2021). His accolades include three Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Kennedy Center Honor, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was born on January 16, 1980, in New York City to Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis Miranda Jr., a Democratic Party consultant. The name “Lin-Manuel” was inspired by a poem about the Vietnam War, Nana roja para mi hijo Lin Manuel, by the Puerto Rican writer José Manuel Torres Santiago. He was raised in the neighborhood of Inwood. He is of Puerto Rican descent, along with Mexican from a grandparent. During childhood and his teens, he spent at least one month each year with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico.[20][21] Miranda has one older sister, Luz, who is the Chief Financial Officer of the MirRam Group, a strategic consulting firm in Government and Communications.

Miranda attended Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School. Among his classmates was journalist Chris Hayes, who was Miranda's first director when Miranda starred in a school play described by Hayes as “a 20-minute musical that featured a maniacal fetal pig in a nightmare that [Miranda] had cut up in biology class”. His classmates also included rapper Immortal Technique, who bullied Miranda, although the two later became friends. Miranda began writing musicals at school.

As a student, Miranda wrote the earliest draft of what would become his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, in 1999, his sophomore year of college at Wesleyan University. After the show was accepted by Wesleyan's student theater company, Second Stage, Miranda added freestyle rap and salsa numbers, and the show was premiered there in 1999. Miranda wrote and directed several other musicals at Wesleyan and acted in many other productions, ranging from musicals to William Shakespeare. He graduated from Wesleyan in 2002.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, Miranda made his Broadway debut in the 2008 musical In the Heights, in which he starred and wrote the music and lyrics. The production was a critical and commercial success, winning the Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Original Score, and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. The stage musical was adapted into a film released in June 2021. Miranda gained wider recognition for writing the script, music, and lyrics for Hamilton, which has been acclaimed as a pop culture phenomenon since its 2015 Broadway premiere. It earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for a record 16 Tony Awards and won 11, including Miranda's first win for the Best Book of a Musical. The Hamilton cast recording spent ten weeks atop Billboard's Top Rap Albums chart and became the eleventh-biggest album of the 2010s. The Hamilton Mixtape, a cover album by Miranda, further reached number one on the Billboard 200.

A frequent collaborator of the Walt Disney Company, Miranda has written original songs for the studio, which has garnered him two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song (“How Far I'll Go” and “Dos Oruguitas”). He worked on the 2016 animated musical Moana and wrote the story and music for Encanto – a widespread critical and commercial success; its song “We Don't Talk About Bruno” broke various records, marked Miranda's first-ever number-one song on the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles charts, and cemented his mainstream fame. He starred as Jack in the musical fantasy Mary Poppins Returns (2018), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. For his performance in the Disney+ live stage recording of Hamilton released in 2020, he received Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Award nominations. On March 28, 2022, the movie Encanto received the Oscar for best animated feature.

Miranda debuted as a film director with Tick, Tick...Boom! (2021), a biographical musical drama. He also had a voice role in the animated film Vivo, released in 2021. His television work includes recurring roles on The Electric Company (2009 – 2010) and His Dark Materials (2019). Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live in 2016 and had a guest role on Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2018, for which he was nominated twice for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. He has been politically active on behalf of Puerto Rico and supported the 2016 PROMESA. He met with politicians in 2016 to speak out in favor of debt relief for Puerto Rico and raised funds for rescue efforts and disaster relief after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Miranda received an honorary degree in 2009 from Yeshiva University in Washington Heights, Manhattan, becoming the youngest person to receive an honorary degree from that university. Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, presented Miranda with the degree.

He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 2015 from his alma mater, Wesleyan University and gave their commencement address. In May 2016, he received an honorary Doctorate of the Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and gave the commencement speech.

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