Lin-Manuel Miranda

**Lin-Manuel Miranda** (born January 16, 1980) is an American songwriter, actor, singer, filmmaker, rapper, and playwright. He is known for creating the Broadway musicals *Hamilton* (2015) and *In the Heights* (2005), and the soundtracks for the animated films *Moana* (2016), *Encanto* (2021), and *Vivo* (2021). He produced and wrote songs in the 2023 live-action Disney film *The Little Mermaid*, which is based on the 1989 animated film of the same name.

## Early life and education

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 Catholic in the neighborhood of Inwood. He is of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and African descent. During childhood and his teens, he spent at least one month each year with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. 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.

## Personal life

### Family

Miranda married Vanessa Nadal, a high school friend, in 2010. At the wedding reception, Miranda, along with the wedding party, performed the *Fiddler on the Roof* song "To Life". Nadal was a lawyer at the law firm Jones Day. Miranda and Nadal's first son, Sebastian, was born in November 2014. Their second son, Francisco, was born in February 2018. His son Sebastian was named after the Jamaican crab from *The Little Mermaid*, one of his favorite films, the reason for which he took the job of composing the music for live-action version. Sebastian was the first name listed in the production babies credits of *Moana*, for which Miranda wrote the songs. Miranda’s son Francisco is listed as a production baby in the credits for Vivo.

Miranda discovered that he is related to artists Residente and iLe of Calle 13 during a 2009 concert by the group in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Miranda was invited to perform. Backstage, the mother of Residente and ILE revealed their connection to Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, founder of the Puerto Rican Independence Party. Miranda and Residente have since confirmed the relationship. In 2017, Miranda performed on the opening track of Residente's self-titled debut album.

Miranda is a cousin of professional baseball player José Miranda.

### Activism

After a meeting with President Barack Obama in March 2016, Miranda joined U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democratic lawmakers to call for congressional action to back a Senate bill in Washington that would allow Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy and significantly ease its $70 billion government-debt burden. Miranda was particularly active in the wake of Hurricane Maria's devastation in Puerto Rico, and by December 2017, proceeds from his song "Almost Like Praying" helped the Hispanic Federation raise $22 million for rescue efforts and disaster relief.

Miranda uses proceeds from *Hamilton* to support Graham Windham, a nonprofit adoption agency founded by Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. Miranda performs at their fundraising gala benefits in New York City and helps to fundraise for children in foster care.

He performed "Found/Tonight" with Ben Platt at the March for Our Lives anti-gun violence rally in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018.

In order to raise money for Puerto Rico's reconstruction after being struck by hurricanes Irma and María, including at least $15 million to be channeled through the Flamboyán Foundation, Lin-Manuel decided to take, and once again play the protagonist role in *Hamilton* to his father's native Puerto Rico. The Miranda family donated approximately $1 million to bring the University of Puerto Rico theater up to par in order to use it as the venue for the musical's performance in January 2018. After tickets sold out in two hours for the three-week run, producers decided to move out of the university venue due to warnings of potential disruptions by a university workers' labor organization, and move the already-installed set to the Luis A. Ferré Performing Arts Center in Santurce, where the performances ran from January 11 to January 27. The production donated additional hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements to the Ferré Performing Arts Center.

In 2016, Miranda advocated for the passing of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), a law setting out to restructure the debt of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. The law led to budget cuts resulting in the closure of over 200 public schools, cuts to government labor benefits, and budget cuts at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). It was met with protests, with UPR shutting down due to student strikes over the measures in 2017. Miranda became a target of criticism, especially when he performed *Hamilton* in Puerto Rico, given his lobbying on the bill as well as the musical's subject matter of the United States which many Puerto Ricans see as an oppressor of the island. During the post show, Miranda met with protestors explaining that he had seen PROMESA as the only bipartisan option for the debt crisis previously, he does not support the austerity measures introduced and that he believes full debt-relief should now be pursued. Subsequently, he has argued for full debt-relief for the island and noted that the 2016 act has not led to the promised relief.

## Awards and honors

Among his numerous accolades, Miranda has won a Pulitzer Prize, five Grammys, three Tony Awards, two Emmys, and two Olivier Awards and has been nominated for two Academy Awards. In 2015, he was the recipient of a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Fellows Program.

In 2016, *Time* magazine included Miranda in its annual *Time 100* as one of the "Most Influential People in the World" and he received a star on the Puerto Rico Walk of Fame. Miranda received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 30, 2018. In December 2018, he received the Kennedy Center Honors for creating *Hamilton*.

In 2015, Miranda was the recipient of *Smithsonian* Magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the History category. In 2019, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery awarded Miranda the Portrait of a Nation prize.

### **Honorary degrees**

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. In July 2016, The University of Puerto Rico approved to grant him the degree of doctor honoris causa. In July 2022, he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music in London, England.

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