Joey Graceffa

Multi-talented YouTube star Joey Graceffa found fame vlogging about his life before branching out into short films, reality TV and pop music. Born in Marlborough, MA, Graceffa began posting videos on YouTube as a 16-year-old with high school friend Brittany Joyal, and after dropping out of a film studies course at Fitchburg State College, moved to Los Angeles to focus solely on his online personality. After launching his own eponymous channel, a mixture of comic sketches, personal footage and pop culture observations which quickly attracted a large loyal following, Graceffa moved into traditional media in 2013 with an appearance on the 22nd series of reality phenomenon "The Amazing Race" (CBS, 2001-) alongside fellow YouTuber Meghan Camarena. The pair made it to the tenth leg before being eliminated and also teamed up together a year later for the All-Stars version of the show. By that point Graceffa had also started to showcase his acting talents on various web series, playing a vampire temp on mockumentary "MyMusic" (2012-14), and a drifter helping to escape a young boy evade capture from the FBI in short "Eon" (2014) and starring alongside Joey Pollari in futuristic sci-fi "Ethereal" (2014). Graceffa also served as producer on the latter two, and added writer to his resume with "Haunting Ian" (2014), a fantasy short in which he starred as a young man who discovers a secret on returning home to care for his sick mother, and "Storytellers" (2014), a supernatural web series in which he played popular rich kid Hunter Crowley. Having previously released Panem's Best, a concept E.P. based on The Hunger Games, under the guise of The Tributes, and various cover versions, Graceffa then returned to the music world in 2015 with "Don't Wait," an entirely original composition which became a viral hit thanks to an accompanying video in which Graceffa outed himself by kissing his real life boyfriend Daniel Preda. In the same year, Graceffa starred as the villainous King of Limbo in the fantasy web series "The Fourth Door" (2015) and played himself in zombie reality spoof "Fight of the Living Dead" (2015) and feature-length action comedy "Bob Thunder: Internet Assassin" (2015). Graceffa then released his memoir, In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World, and took on hosting duties as The Savant in "Escape the Night" (2016), a Prohibition era-based murder-mystery series which he also helped to create.