Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda is an American composer, lyricist, playwright, actor, and producer. Born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents in 1980, Miranda created, wrote the music and lyrics for, and starred in two of the most celebrated musicals in Broadway history: In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015). Hamilton, which retells the story of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton using hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and traditional Broadway idioms with a racially diverse cast, became a transformative cultural phenomenon. Hamilton: The Revolution (2016), co-written with journalist Jeremy McCarter, combines the libretto of Hamilton with Miranda's annotations and a behind-the-scenes history of the show's development. The book won the Goodreads Choice Award for Nonfiction in 2016 and spent more than a year on bestseller lists. Miranda has won multiple Tony Awards, Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015. Miranda has also written music for animated films including Moana (2016), Encanto (2021, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Song), and Vivo (2021). He continues to be one of the most influential figures in American musical theatre and popular culture.