Lin-manuel Miranda

Miranda was born on January 16, 1980, in New York City to Luz Towns-Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis Miranda Jr., a political consultant. He is of predominately Puerto Rican descent and also has distant Mexican, English, and African American ancestry. His parents named him "Lin-Manuel" after a poem about the Vietnam War by Puerto Rican writer José Manuel Torres Santiago entitled "Nana roja para mi hijo Lin Manuel" ("Red Lullaby for My Son Lin Manuel"). Miranda grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan and was raised as a Catholic. During childhood and his teens, Miranda spent at least one month each year with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. Miranda has one older sister, Luz, who is the Chief Financial Officer of the MirRam Group, a strategic consulting firm in Government and Communications. Miranda attended Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School. Among his classmates was Chris Hayes, now a journalist. He was Miranda's first director when Miranda starred in a school play, described by Hayes as "a 20-minute musical that featured a maniacal fetal pig in a nightmare that [Miranda] had cut up in biology class". His classmates also included Immortal Technique, a rapper who had bullied Miranda, although the two later became friends. Miranda began writing musicals at school. Miranda wrote the earliest draft of what would become his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, in 1999, during his sophomore year of college at Wesleyan University. After the show was accepted by Wesleyan's student theater company, Second Stage, Miranda added freestyle rap and salsa numbers, and the show was premiered there in 1999. Miranda wrote and directed several other musicals at Wesleyan and acted in many other productions, ranging from musicals to William Shakespeare. He graduated from Wesleyan in 2002.