Lin-Manuel Miranda Bio

Early Life

Miranda was born on January 16, 1980, in New York City, the son of Puerto Rican parents. His clinical psychologist mother, Luz Towns-Miranda, and his political consultant father, Luis A. Miranda, Jr., settled in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. Lin and his sister grew up in a music-oriented family — both siblings took piano lessons and were encouraged by parents who loved the music of Broadway.

Exposed to a wide range of musical genres while growing up, Miranda also developed a love of hip-hop. He went on to major in theater studies at Wesleyan University.Originally Lin's father Luis wanted Miranda to be a lawyer but Lin himself never wanted to go down that path. Lin had a passion for music.

Current Life

Miranda wed scientist and lawyer Vanessa Nadal, a graduate of MIT, in 2010. The couple has two sons, Sebastian and Francisco.

In the Heights

In 1999 Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote his first musical, In the Heights, when he was a sophomore at Wesleyan University. He was nineteen almost twenty and started to create In the Heights. The play made its Off-Broadway premiere in 2005. Lin starring in the production and writing of the show’s music and lyrics, In the Heights was set in Washington Heights, featuring Latin sounds interwoven with more standard show tune fare. However two years later in 2008 In the Heights made its Official Broadway debut in 2008, also it was a hit, running for almost two years and winning four Tony Awards, including the prize for best musical.

Hamilton

While on vacation in 2008, Miranda picked up the 2004 Ron Chernow book Alexander Hamilton, an acclaimed biography of America’s first secretary of the treasury. Having already developed an interest in the historical figure, Miranda was inspired to create a full-length work chronicling Hamilton’s life.

"I knew that he was on our $10 bill in the States and I knew that he died in a duel. You know you learn that in high school and that was about it. And that was enough for me to pick up a book off the shelf and I was going on vacation with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I just wanted a big book to read.”- LMM

He first presented a song from the future show in 2009, at the White House's first-ever Evening of Poetry & Spoken Word.

It took Lin seven years to write the show and music its also two hours and thirty minutes long. The hardest song to write was ‘The World Was Wide Enough’ . Lin explains that moment was the hardest to get right and that inspiration hit him unexpectedly.

“I think my collaborators will tell you the hardest one was probably Hamilton’s final moments. We were in tech, a few days away from our first audience, and I still hadn’t written it. It was, how do you sum up someone’s final moments on a dueling ground? And it probably underwent the most revision because I don’t know what that’s like and it takes a real imaginative leap. I kept writing songs for the moment and all the songs felt wrong. And then I woke up New Year’s Day 2015 and my son, who was about a month and a half old, was asleep on my chest. My dog was asleep between my legs, and my wife was asleep next to me. And it was quiet, and I realized ‘Oh, quiet.’ I haven’t used quiet for the whole two hours and 30 minutes of this show. That’s the one move left”

The show starts of with the first song ‘Alexander Hamiltion’ in the end of that song Burr sings “And me, I'm the damn fool that shot him”. So the song ‘The World Was Wide Enough’ It depicts the moment when Hamiltion and Burr go to duel. This duel cost Hamiltion is life. Basically, it’s the moment the entire musical has built to, so it makes sense why Lin-Manuel Miranda felt so much pressure to get it right.

Hamilton eventually debuted at the Public Theater in early 2015, and just months later hit Broadway, racking up monumental advance ticket sales. That same year he was also honored with a MacArthur Foundation Awards

Hamilton has garnered wide acclaim for its unique sensibilities—relying on a Black and Latino cast with hip-hop/R&B sounds in a stage musical format to tell the story of this U.S. Founding Father. The Broadway musical has become a must-see event, not only for theater fans but also for scores of famous figures, including President Barack Obama and Duke and Duchess of Sussex Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

In April 2016, Hamilton won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and in May, the musical set a new record when it was nominated for 16 Tony Awards, the most in Broadway history. The production ultimately received 11 Tonys—just one short of the record-setting 12 wins had by The Producers. Hamilton counted among its wins the prizes for best musical and best direction, with Miranda himself receiving two Tonys in the categories of original score and book.

Miranda has also won two Grammys for the cast recordings of In the Heights and Hamilton and an Emmy Award for the music and lyrics at the 2013 Tony Awards show.

Other projects

In 2016, Miranda brought his talents to the big screen, composing the lyrics and music for "How Far I'll Go," for the animated film Moana. The track was nominated for an Oscar in 2017, before winning a Grammy the following year for Best Song Written for Visual Media. Extending his reach into the film industry, Miranda landed a prominent role as Jack the lamplighter in the well-received Mary Poppins Returns (2018).