Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer-songwriter. Her music is noted for its melancholic exploration of glamor and romance, with frequent references to pop culture and 1950s–1970s Americana. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an MTV Video Music Award, three MTV Europe Music Awards, two Brit Awards, two Billboard Women in Music awards and a Satellite Award, in addition to nominations for eleven Grammy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. Variety honored her at their Hitmakers Awards for being "one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 21st century". In 2023, Rolling Stone placed Del Rey on their list of the "200 Greatest Singers of All Time", while their sister publication Rolling Stone UK named her as the "greatest American songwriter of the 21st century".

Raised in upstate New York, Del Rey moved to New York City in 2005 to pursue a music career. Del Rey's breakthrough came in 2011 with the viral success of her single "Video Games", leading to a recording contract with Polydor and Interscope. She achieved critical and commercial success with her second album, Born to Die (2012), which featured a moody, hip hop-inflected sound and spawned the sleeper hit "Summertime Sadness". The album topped numerous national charts around the world, and in 2023 became the second album by a woman to spend more than 500 weeks on the US Billboard 200. She subsequently topped the US charts with the albums Ultraviolence (2014) and Lust for Life (2017).

Her critically acclaimed sixth album Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019) was nominated for Album of the Year at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards and listed as one of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" by Rolling Stone. Del Rey's ninth studio album Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd was released in 2023, supported by the critically acclaimed single "A&W", which was named one of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" by Rolling Stone. Later that year, she released the Billboard Global 200 top-20 hit "Say Yes to Heaven".

Del Rey has collaborated on soundtracks for visual media; in 2013, she wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed musical short film Tropico and released "Young and Beautiful" for the romantic drama The Great Gatsby, which was highly praised by critics and received Grammy Award and Critics' Choice Award nominations. In 2014, she recorded "Once Upon a Dream" for the dark fantasy adventure film Maleficent and the titular theme song for the biopic Big Eyes, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Del Rey also recorded the collaboration "Don't Call Me Angel" for the action comedy Charlie's Angels (2019). In 2020, Del Rey published the poetry and photography collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass.

Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born on June 21, 1985, in Manhattan, New York City, to Robert England Grant Jr., a copywriter at Grey Group, and Patricia Ann "Pat" Grant (née Hill), an account executive at the same organization. She has a younger sister, Caroline "Chuck" Grant, and a younger brother, Charlie Grant. She was raised Catholic and is of Scottish and English descent. When she was a year old, the family moved to Lake Placid, New York. In Lake Placid, her father worked for a furniture company before becoming an entrepreneurial domain investor; her mother worked as a schoolteacher. There, she attended St. Agnes School in her elementary years and began singing in her church choir, where she was the cantor.

She attended the high school where her mother taught for a year, but when she was 14 or 15, her parents sent her to Kent School, an Episcopal boarding school in Connecticut, to get sober from alcoholism. Alcoholism, along with drugs, had been a problem that started in her teenage years and had become so serious that her entire family, including Grant herself, was worried. Grant shared in an interview: "That's really why I got sent to boarding school aged 14—to get sober." Her uncle, an admissions officer at the school, secured her financial aid to attend. According to Grant, she had trouble making friends during much of her teenage and early adult years. She has said she was preoccupied with death from a young age, and its role in her feelings of anxiety and alienation:

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal. For some reason that knowledge sort of overshadowed my experience. I was unhappy for some time. I got into a lot of trouble. I used to drink a lot. That was a hard time in my life.

Grant later dropped out of school to go to rehab; she has been sober since 2003. She spent a year living on Long Island with her aunt and uncle and working as a waitress. During this time, Grant's uncle taught her to play guitar and she "realized [that she] could probably write a million songs with those six chords". Shortly after, she began writing songs and performing in nightclubs around the city under various names such as "Sparkle Jump Rope Queen" and "Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena". "I was always singing, but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously", she said: