Lin-Manuel Miranda

Born in New York City, Lin-Manuel Miranda lived in the Inwood neighborhood of upper Manhattan. Miranda attended Hunter College High School before moving on to Wesleyan University. Miranda also spent several weeks every year visiting his grandparents in Puerto Rico. Miranda's father was a political advisor to mayor Ed Koch, and as a young adult Miranda often helped to pitch jingles for political candidates including one for Eliot Spitzer's 2006 campaign. At Wesleyan, Miranda co-founded a hip-hop comedy troupe, and wrote the first draft of what was to become his first musical, "In the Heights." The show was performed at Wesleyan in the Spring of 1999. After his graduation, Miranda continued to work on "In the Heights," which moved to Broadway in 2008. Miranda worked as an English teacher at his former high school while working on his projects. In addition to the musicals "Working," and "Bring It On!," Miranda appeared in an episode of "The Sopranos"(HBO, 1997-2007), and "House" (Fox, 2004-2012). After reading Alexander Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, Miranda began performing a series of raps inspired by the work that was he later expanded to the musical "Hamilton." "Hamilton" debuted on Broadway in 2015 to wildly positive reviews. Miranda was a 2015 recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for the musical. Its commercial success also made him a mainstream figure, appearing on The Grammy Awards, starring in a sketch on "Inside Amy Schumer" (Comedy Central 2013-) and hosting "Saturday Night Live" (NBC 1975-). After leaving the show in 2016, Miranda produced the various artists album The Hamilton Mixtape, featuring songs from the show as interpreted by popular singers. His next major project was composing the score for the Disney animated film "Moana" (2016), starring Dwayne Johnson. In late 2016, Miranda announced that he was executive producing an adaptation of author Pat Rothfuss' fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle, which would involve both feature films and a television series.