Lin-Manuel Miranda drafted his first Broadway hit as a college sophomore
Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the first version of In the Heights in 1999 for a student theatre group at Wesleyan, adding freestyle rap and salsa along the way. Nine years later it won the Tony for Best Musical. Then came Hamilton, a Pulitzer, a record 16 Tony nominations and Disney's We Don't Talk About Bruno.
Miranda was born in New York City on January 16, 1980, to a clinical psychologist and a political consultant, and is mostly of Puerto Rican descent. His parents named him after a Puerto Rican poem about the Vietnam War, a red lullaby addressed to a son called Lin Manuel. He grew up in Inwood in upper Manhattan and spent at least a month every year with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. At Hunter College High School his first director was classmate Chris Hayes, later a journalist, who staged a short musical Miranda wrote about a fetal pig haunting his nightmares after biology class.
After graduating from Wesleyan in 2002 he spent years reworking In the Heights with director Thomas Kail, later joined by playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes. It opened off-Broadway in 2007 and on Broadway in March 2008, with Miranda starring, and won Tonys for Best Musical and Best Original Score plus a Grammy; a film followed in 2021.
Hamilton, which he wrote and starred in, reached Broadway in 2015 and became a cultural phenomenon. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 11 Tonys from 16 nominations, including Miranda's first for Best Book. Its cast album spent ten weeks at the top of Billboard's rap albums chart and ranked eleventh among the biggest albums of the 2010s.
For Disney he has written songs for Moana, Encanto and Vivo, and two of those songs, one from each of the first two films, were nominated for Academy Awards; We Don't Talk About Bruno became his first number one in both the United States and Britain. He played Jack in Mary Poppins Returns and directed his first film, Tick, Tick... Boom!. He has campaigned for Puerto Rico's debt relief and raised money after Hurricane Maria in 2017, and received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.
Source: Lin-Manuel Miranda
