Lin-Manuel Miranda ( man-WELL; born January 16, 1980) is an American songwriter, actor, filmmaker, librettist, and producer. He created the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton, and the soundtracks for the animated films Moana, Vivo, and Encanto. He has received numerous accolades including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, three Tony Awards, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Emmy Awards, and five Grammy Awards, along with nominations for two Academy Awards. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.
Miranda made his Broadway debut in 2008, writing the music and lyrics for and starring in the musical In the Heights, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It was later adapted as a 2021 film of the same name. Miranda returned to Broadway in 2015, writing the script, music, and lyrics, as well as starring in the musical Hamilton, which was praised by critics and became a popular culture phenomenon. Hamilton won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for a record 16 Tonys and won 11, including Miranda's first win for the Best Book of a Musical. The Hamilton cast recording spent 10 weeks atop Billboard's Top Rap Albums chart and became the eleventh-biggest album of the 2010s.
A frequent collaborator of the Walt Disney Company, Miranda has written original songs for the studio. He gained two Oscar nominations for "How Far I'll Go" and "Dos Oruguitas" from Moana and Encanto, respectively. The song "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Encanto broke various records and marked Miranda's first number-one song on the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles charts. He starred as Jack in the musical fantasy Mary Poppins Returns (2018), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. For his performance in the Disney+ live stage recording of Hamilton released in 2020, he received a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nomination. Miranda debuted as a film director with Tick, Tick... Boom!.
His television work includes recurring roles on The Electric Company (2009–2010) and His Dark Materials (2019–2022). Miranda received Primetime Emmy Award-nominations for hosting Saturday Night Live in 2016, and guest starring in Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2018. He has been politically active on behalf of Puerto Rico. Miranda 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.
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Early life and education
Miranda was born on January 16, 1980, in New York City to Luz Towns-Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis Miranda Jr., a political consultant. He is of predominantly Puerto Rican descent and also has distant Mexican, English, and African American ancestry. His parents named him "Lin-Manuel" after a poem about the Vietnam War by Puerto Rican writer José Manuel Torres Santiago entitled "Nana roja para mi hijo Lin Manuel" ("Red Lullaby for My Son Lin Manuel"). Miranda grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan and was raised as a Catholic. During childhood and his teens, Miranda 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 Chris Hayes, now a journalist. Hayes was Miranda's first director when he starred in a school play, which was 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 had bullied Miranda, although the two later became friends. Miranda began writing musicals at school.
Miranda wrote the earliest draft of what would become his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, in 1999, during 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.
Career
Theater
In 2002, Miranda and John Buffalo Mailer worked with director Thomas Kail to revise In the Heights. Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes joined the team in 2004. After premiering in Connecticut in 2005 and opening at the 37 Arts Theater off-Broadway in 2007, the musical went to Broadway, opening in March 2008.
It was nominated for 13 Tonys, winning four, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. It also won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Miranda's performance in the leading role of Usnavi earned him a nomination for a Tony. Miranda left the cast of the Broadway production on February 15, 2009.
Miranda reprised the role when the national tour played in Los Angeles from June 23 to July 25, 2010. He again joined the tour in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Miranda rejoined the cast as Usnavi from December 25, 2010, until the production closed on January 9, 2011, after 29 previews and 1,185 regular performances.
Miranda created other work for the stage during this period. He wrote Spanish-language dialogue and worked with Stephen Sondheim to translate into Spanish song lyrics for the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story. During this time, he also performed at bar and bat mitzvahs. In 2008, he was invited by composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz to contribute two new songs to a revised version of Schwartz and Nina Faso's 1978 musical Working, which opened in May 2008 at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida.
During these years, Miranda worked 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. The self-titled show gained positive reviews.
Miranda co-wrote the music and lyrics for Bring It On with Tom Kitt and Amanda Green. It premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia in January 2011. The musical began a US national tour on October 30, 2011, in Los Angeles, California. It played a limited engagement on Broadway at the St. James Theatre, beginning previews on July 12, and officially opening on August 1, 2012. It closed on December 30, 2012. It was nominated for Tony Awards in the categories of Best Musical and Best Choreography.
Film
Miranda made his feature film debut in the Walt Disney Pictures live-action film The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012).
Miranda interviewed with Disney in the winter of 2013. He submitted a six-song demo package to Walt Disney Animation Studios. This began a series of collaborations with the company:
Moana – In the spring of 2014, the studio hired Miranda to help write and perform music for Moana, its 2016 animated feature film. From 2014 to 2016, Miranda collaborated with Opetaia Foa'i and Mark Mancina on the songs for Moana. He later explained that because he was so busy with Moana and Hamilton, he turned down other projects "that would have distracted" him, but this served as an "ego check" as Hamilton became a hit. Moana opened in November 2016 and was a box office hit, earning positive reviews and praise from critics for Miranda's songwriting. Miranda also sang the song "We Know the Way" in the film, and recorded a duet with Jordan Fisher of the song "You're Welcome", which was played over the film's end credits. For the song "How Far I'll Go", Miranda won a Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media, and received Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, and Oscar nominations.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens – While working on Hamilton, Miranda contributed music for the Disney-distributed film Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), writing a song for the scene in Maz Kanata's cantina, an homage to the classic Mos Eisley Cantina scene and song by Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes.
DuckTales – Miranda debuted in May 2018 as the voice of Fenton "Gizmoduck" Crackshell-Cabrera in Disney Channel's 2017 reboot of DuckTales, and made recurring appearances throughout the show's run.
Mary Poppins Returns – Miranda plays Jack, a lamplighter, and former apprentice to Bert, the chimney sweep played by Dick Van Dyke in the original 1964 film Mary Poppins. This was his first major role after leaving the Broadway cast of Hamilton. Miranda traveled to London in 2017 to shoot his scenes for the film, directed by Rob Marshall, which was released in December 2018.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – Following his work on The Force Awakens, Miranda contributed music for the Disney-distributed film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), writing a song for the scene on the desert planet Pasaana, in addition to making a cameo appearance as a Resistance trooper.
Television series
Miranda also worked in television. In 2007, he made a small appearance on the television series The Sopranos in the episode "Remember When", and in 2009, he played Juan "Alvie" Alvarez, Gregory House's roommate in a psychiatric hospital, in the two-hour season six premiere episode of House; he returned to the role in May 2010. For Sesame Street, he occasionally played roles and sang the theme song to the recurring segment Murray Has a Little Lamb. He was a composer and actor on the 2009 PBS Kids Go! revival of The Electric Company and appeared in the CollegeHumor sketch "Hardly Working: Rap Battle", playing himself working as an intern and rapper.
He played several television roles during this period. He appeared on the TV series Modern Family in the 2011 episode "Good Cop Bad Dog". In 2013, he played the recurring role of Ruben Marcado in the NBC drama Do No Harm. He later appeared in the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, in an all-verse episode titled "Bedtime Stories" that aired in November 2013.
On April 24, 2016, on the TV show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, at the end of a segment about the debt crisis in Puerto Rico, Miranda performed an emotional rap about allowing the island to restructure its debt. Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live on October 8, 2016, and played himself in two episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2017, receiving Emmy Award nominations for both appearances. In 2019, Miranda was the guest narrator at Disney's Candlelight Processional at Disneyland. Miranda performed the theme song for the Netflix original series The Magic School Bus Rides Again, the revival and sequel series of the 1994 series The Magic School Bus. He played the part of Amy's brother (David Santiago) in the episode "The Golden Child" in Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
In 2019, Miranda served as an executive producer on the FX limited series Fosse/Verdon based on the relationship of Broadway dancer, choreographer, and director Bob Fosse and his wife dancer Gwen Verdon. Miranda also made a brief appearance playing Roy Scheider from All That Jazz. The series won critical acclaim, and Miranda was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series as an executive producer.
Miranda was cast as Lee Scoresby in the BBC series television adaptation of His Dark Materials (2019–2022). Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter praised Miranda in his review writing, "[While] I appreciate that Miranda feels initially miscast as Pullman's paragon of cowboy American masculinity...[he] forces you to reconstruct an image of American manliness around him, making him exactly what the series needs".
Music
Miranda was listed as a producer on the track "Peanuts 2 N Elephant" from Lil Wayne's fourteenth solo studio album, Tha Carter VI. He provided backing vocals for several tracks on the 2025 Mountain Goats album Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan.
Personal life
Family
Miranda and his wife, Vanessa Nadal, attended high school together and married in 2010. Nadal is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Fordham University School of Law. She was a lawyer at the law firm Jones Day from 2010 to 2016. At the wedding reception, Miranda, along with the wedding party, performed the Fiddler on the Roof song "To Life". His wife is Dominican and Austrian, which gave him some German language familiarity when collaborating on the German translation of Hamilton.
Miranda and Nadal have two sons: Sebastian (b. 2014) and Francisco (b. 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 the live-action version. Sebastian was the first name listed in the production babies credits of Moana, for which Miranda wrote the songs. Miranda said Sebastian was bilingual in English and Spanish, and also knew some German. 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 used proceeds from Hamilton to support Graham Windham, a nonprofit adoption agency founded by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. Miranda performed at their fundraising gala benefits in New York City to help 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, Miranda decided to take Hamilton to his father's native Puerto Rico, reprising his role as the protagonist. Miranda's 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 to restructure Puerto Rico's debt 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, and Miranda himself became a target of criticism. Miranda met with protestors after his Hamilton performance in Puerto Rico, explaining that he had seen PROMESA as the only bipartisan option for the debt crisis and does not support the island's controversial austerity measures. He has since argued for full debt-relief for the island, noting that the 2016 act has not led to promised relief.
Awards and honors
Among his numerous accolades, Miranda has won a Pulitzer Prize, five Grammys, three Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, 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. The Hamilton Mixtape, a cover album by Miranda, further reached number one on the Billboard 200.
In 2026, Miranda was honored as a Disney Legend at the D23 convention.
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 granted him a doctorate, honoris causa. In July 2022, he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music in London, England.
