Lady Gaga

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. Known for her image reinventions and versatility across the entertainment industry, she is an influential figure in popular music. With estimated sales of 124 million records, she is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Publications such as Billboard and Rolling Stone have ranked her among the greatest artists in history.

After signing with Interscope Records in 2007, Gaga achieved global recognition with her debut album, The Fame (2008), and its reissue The Fame Monster (2009). The project scored a string of successful singles, including "Just Dance", "Poker Face", "Bad Romance", "Telephone", and "Alejandro". Her second studio album, Born This Way (2011), explored electronic rock and techno-pop and sold more than one million copies first-week in the US. Its title track became the fastest-selling song on the iTunes Store, with over one million downloads in less than a week. Following her electronic dance music-influenced third album, Artpop (2013), she pursued jazz on the album Cheek to Cheek (2014) with Tony Bennett, and delved into soft rock on the album Joanne (2016).

Gaga also ventured into acting, gaining praise for her leading roles in the miniseries American Horror Story: Hotel (2015–2016) and the films A Star Is Born (2018) and House of Gucci (2021). Her contributions to the A Star Is Born soundtrack, which spawned the chart-topping single "Shallow", made her the first woman to win an Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Grammy Award in one year. Gaga returned to dance-pop with her album Chromatica (2020), which yielded the number-one single "Rain on Me". She reunited with Bennett for their second and final collaborative album, Love for Sale (2021), and revisited her early pop sound on the album Mayhem (2025), which contains the successful singles "Die with a Smile" and "Abracadabra".

Gaga has amassed six number-one studio albums and six number-one songs on the US Billboard 200 and Hot 100 charts, respectively, and is the only female artist with four singles that have each sold at least 10 million copies globally. She also holds the record for the most-attended concert by a female artist. According to Forbes, she was the world's highest-paid female musician and the most powerful celebrity in 2011, while Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010 and 2019. Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, a Sports Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, 22 MTV Video Music Awards, and a recognition from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Gaga's philanthropy and activism focus on mental health awareness and LGBTQ rights. Her business ventures include vegan cosmetics brand Haus Labs and the non-profit organization, the Born This Way Foundation, which supports the wellness of young people.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born into an upper-middle-class Catholic family on March 28, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Lenox Hill, Manhattan, New York City. Both of her parents have Italian ancestry. Her parents are Cynthia Louise (née Bissett), a philanthropist and business executive, and Internet entrepreneur Joseph Germanotta, and she has a younger sister named Natali. Brought up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Gaga said in an interview that her parents came from lower-class families and worked hard for everything. From age 11, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school. Gaga has described her high-school self as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure". She considered herself a misfit and was mocked for "being either too provocative or too eccentric".

Gaga began playing the piano at age four when her mother insisted she become "a cultured young woman". She took piano lessons and practiced through her childhood. The lessons taught her to learn music by ear, which Gaga preferred over reading sheet music. Her parents encouraged her to pursue music and enrolled her in Creative Arts Camp. As a teenager, she played at open mic nights. Gaga played the lead roles of Adelaide in the play Guys and Dolls and Philia in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Regis High School. She also studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for ten years. Her screen debut was a background appearance in the 2000 music video for AC/DC's song "Stiff Upper Lip". Gaga auditioned unsuccessfully for New York shows, though did appear in a small background role as a high-school student in a 2001 episode of The Sopranos titled "The Telltale Moozadell". Fan interest in that episode increased when a clip of Gaga's scene surfaced online in 2010. She later said of her inclination towards music:

I don't know exactly where my affinity for music comes from, but it is the thing that comes easiest to me. When I was like three years old, I may have been even younger, my mom always tells this really embarrassing story of me propping myself up and playing the keys like this because I was too young and short to get all the way up there. Just go like this on the low end of the piano ... I was really, really good at piano, so my first instincts were to work so hard at practicing piano, and I might not have been a natural dancer, but I am a natural musician. That is the thing that I believe I am the greatest at.

In 2003, Gaga gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, a music school at New York University (NYU)'s Tisch School of the Arts, and lived in an NYU dorm. She studied music there and improved her songwriting skills by writing essays on art, religion, social issues, and politics, including a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. In 2005, Gaga withdrew from school during the second semester of her second year to focus on her music career. That year, she also played an unsuspecting diner customer for MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show.