Lin-Manuel Miranda

**Lin-Manuel Miranda** is an actor, rapper, producer, and playwright. He voices Juan in the animated special of *One Day at a Time*titled "The Politics Episode."

## Work

### Profession

Composer, lyricist, singer, rapper, actor, producer, and playwright.

### Known for

In the Heights, and Hamilton.Juan on One Day at a Time

## Early Life

**Miranda** was born in New York City and raised in the neighborhood of Inwood, the son of Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis A. Miranda, Jr., a Democratic Party consultant who advised New York City mayor Ed Koch. Miranda has one older sister, Luz, who is the Chief Financial Officer of the MirRam Group. During childhood and his teens, he spent at least one month each year with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico.

He is of mostly Puerto Rican descent. His mother's ancestors include an interracial couple, Sophie, who was black, and David Towns, who was white; from the early 1800s, this couple spent their married life trying to outrun slavery as laws and governments changed around them. Ensuing branches of the Towns family primarily married Mexican spouses in Texas and Mexico, and Miranda, for his part, has described his ancestry as a quarter Mexican. 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.

Miranda attended Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School, where his classmates included journalist Chris Hayes, who was Miranda's first director when the latter 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," and rapper Immortal Technique, who bullied Miranda during high school, although the two later became friends. It was during high school that Miranda began writing musicals.

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 Shakespeare. He graduated from Wesleyan in 2002.

## Career

Lin-Manuel Miranda is an American composer, lyricist, singer, rapper, actor, producer, and playwright, widely known for creating and starring in the Broadway musicals *In the Heights* and *Hamilton*. His awards include a Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.

Miranda wrote the music and lyrics for the 2008 Broadway musical *In the Heights*. The stage musical has been made into a film, also titled *In the Heights*, which is scheduled to be released in June 2021. His work won the Tony Award for Best Original Score, the show's cast album won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album,[4] and the show won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Miranda was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his lead role. He gained wider recognition for writing the script, music, and lyrics for *Hamilton*, which has been acclaimed as a pop culture phenomenon since its Broadway premiere in 2015.

The show earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and was nominated for a record-setting 16 Tony Awards, of which it won 11, including Best Musical, Best Original Score and Best Book. For portraying the titular role, Miranda was nominated for another Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. The *Hamilton* cast recording spent ten weeks atop *Billboard*'s Top Rap Albums chart in 2015, and was eventually named by Billboard as the eleventh-biggest album of the 2010s.[6] *The Hamilton Mixtape*, an album of covers of songs from the musical, developed by and featuring Miranda, reached number one on the *Billboard* 200.

Miranda's television work includes recurring roles on *The Electric Company* (2009–2010) and *Do No Harm* (2013). He hosted *Saturday Night Live* for the first time in 2016 and earned his first Emmy award nomination for acting. Among other film work, Miranda contributed music and vocals for a scene in *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* (2015); wrote music and songs in the animated musical *Moana* (2016), which gained him nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and the Academy Award for Best Original Song, for the song "How Far I'll Go"; and 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.

Miranda has been politically active, most notably on behalf of Puerto Rico. 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 struck the island in 2017.

## Theater

 2005
 2007
 2008–09
 2009–10
 2009