A Pulitzer Prize, Grammy, Emmy, Tony Award-winning composer, lyricist, and actor, Lin-Manuel is the creator and original star of Broadway's Hamilton and In the Heights, and the recipient of the 2015 MacArthur Foundation Award and 2018 Kennedy Center Honors. He has been an active supporter of relief efforts in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. He lives with his family in NYC. A graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Miranda made his Broadway debut in 2008 in the musical In the Heights, in which he starred and wrote the music and lyrics. The production was a critical and commercial success, winning the Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Original Score, and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. The stage musical was adapted into a film released in June 2021. Miranda gained wider recognition for writing the script, music, and lyrics for Hamilton, which has been acclaimed as a pop culture phenomenon since its 2015 Broadway premiere. It earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for a record 16 Tony Awards and won 11, including Miranda's first win for the Best Book of a Musical. The Hamilton cast recording spent ten weeks atop Billboard's Top Rap Albums chart and became the eleventh-biggest album of the 2010s. The Hamilton Mixtape, a cover album by Miranda, further reached number one on the Billboard 200.
A frequent collaborator of the Walt Disney Company, Miranda has written original songs for the studio, which has garnered him two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song ("How Far I'll Go" and "Dos Oruguitas"). He worked on the 2016 animated musical Moana, and wrote the story and music for Encanto—a widespread critical and commercial success; its song "We Don't Talk About Bruno" broke various records, marked Miranda's first-ever number-one song on the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles charts, and cemented his mainstream fame. He starred as Jack in the musical fantasy Mary Poppins Returns (2018), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. For his performance in the Disney+ live stage recording of Hamilton released in 2020, he received Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Award nominations.