Lin-Manuel Miranda is a composer, songwriter, actor, writer, and activist of Puerto Rican descent born on January 16, 1980 in New York, USA. He is well known for writing the hit Broadway hip-hop musical Hamilton, and playing the main character. In fact, he won the 2016 Tony Award for best musical for the revolutionary work. Miranda has won multiple Tony Awards, an Oscar, a Pulitzer Prize, a Kennedy Center Honor in 2018, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Award. Miranda also worked with the Hispanic Federation to raise millions of dollars to help Puerto Rico recover from the devastation inflicted by Hurricane Maria.

Miranda watched Les Misérables, his first Broadway musical, when he was seven years old, and it had an indelible effect on him. His preferences also extended to hip-hop and R&B, and he became an accomplished rapper. In high school, he landed the main part in W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and quickly established himself as a staple of the school’s drama program. His musical Hamilton is lively and contagious, with a racially diverse ensemble led by Miranda in the lead character. The musical premiered Off-Broadway in January 2015 at New York City’s Public Theater, where it was a tremendous success, prompting an early relocation to Broadway in July. Hamilton won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2016, and it garnered a record 16 Tony nominations that year, with Miranda receiving numerous honors, including outstanding actor in a major role in a musical. Miranda later contributed to the music for the Disney animated picture Moana (2016), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination for the song “How Far I’ll Go.” In the 2018 musical Mary Poppins Returns, he played Jack, the lamplighter and companion to the eponymous nanny. Miranda went on to feature in the TV show His Dark Materials, 2019, which was based on Philip Pullman’s best-selling fantasy trilogy.