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.

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 full-length album, Born This Way (2011), explored electronic rock and techno-pop and sold more than one million copies first-week. 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 chart-topping single "Die with a Smile".

Having sold an estimated 170 million records, Gaga is one of the world's best selling music artists and the only female artist to have four singles each sell at least 10 million copies globally. Six of her studio albums debuted atop the US Billboard 200. 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. She has been ranked among the greatest artists of all time by various publications. Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, 18 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. She has her own non-profit organization, the Born This Way Foundation, which supports the wellness of young people. Her business ventures include vegan cosmetics brand Haus Labs, launched in 2019.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born to an upper-middle-class Catholic family on March 28, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in 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 create 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". She later said of her inclination towards music:

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.

In a 2014 interview, Gaga discussed being raped at age 19 by her producer, and later undergoing mental and physical therapy for this. She has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and attributes it to the incident, and has credited support from doctors, family, and friends with helping her. Gaga later gave additional details about the rape, including that "the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner at my parents' house because I was vomiting and sick. Because I'd been being abused. I was locked away in a studio for months."

In 2005, Gaga recorded two songs with rapper Melle Mel for an audio book accompanying Cricket Casey's children's novel The Portal in the Park. She also formed a band called the SGBand with some friends from NYU. They played gigs around New York and became a fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene. After the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at the Cutting Room in June, talent scout Wendy Starland recommended her to music producer Rob Fusari. Fusari collaborated with Gaga, who traveled daily to New Jersey, helping to develop her songs and compose new material. The producer said they began dating in May 2006, and claimed to have been the first person to call her "Lady Gaga", which was derived from Queen's song "Radio Ga Ga". According to his account, the name was coined when on one occasion he attempted to call her "Radio Ga Ga" via text message, but the spell checker autocorrected "Radio" to "Lady". Their relationship lasted until January 2007.

Fusari and Gaga established a company called "Team Lovechild, LLC" to promote her career. They recorded and produced electropop tracks, sending them to music industry executives. Joshua Sarubin, the head of Artists and repertoire (A&R) at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively and, after approval from Sarubin's boss Antonio "L.A." Reid, Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September 2006. She was dropped from the label three months later and returned to her family home for Christmas. Gaga began performing at neo-burlesque shows, and said these represented freedom to her. During this time, she met performance artist Lady Starlight, who helped mold her onstage persona. The pair began performing at downtown club venues like the Mercury Lounge, the Bitter End, and the Rockwood Music Hall. Their live performance art piece, known as "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue" and billed as "The Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow", was a tribute to 1970s variety acts. They performed at the 2007 Lollapalooza music festival.

Having initially focused on avant-garde electronic dance music, Gaga began to incorporate pop melodies and the glam rock style of David Bowie and Queen into her songs. While Gaga and Starlight were performing, Fusari continued to develop the songs he had created with her, sending them to the producer and record executive Vincent Herbert. In November 2007, Herbert signed Gaga to his label Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records, established that month. Gaga later credited Herbert as the man who discovered her. Having served as an apprentice songwriter during an internship at Famous Music Publishing, Gaga struck a music publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing. As a result, she was hired to write songs for Britney Spears, New Kids on the Block, Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls. At Interscope, musician Akon was impressed with her singing abilities when she sang a reference vocal for one of his tracks in studio. Akon convinced Jimmy Iovine, chairman and CEO of Interscope Geffen A&M Records (a brother company for Def Jam), to form a joint deal by having Gaga also sign with his own label KonLive Distribution, making her his "franchise player".

In late 2007, Gaga met with songwriter and producer RedOne. She collaborated with him in the recording studio for a week on her debut album, signing with Cherrytree Records, an Interscope imprint established by producer and songwriter Martin Kierszenbaum; she also wrote four songs with Kierszenbaum. Despite securing a record deal, she said that some radio stations found her music too "racy", "dance-oriented", and "underground" for the mainstream market, to which she replied: "My name is Lady Gaga, I've been on the music scene for years, and I'm telling you, this is what's next."

By 2008, Gaga had relocated to Los Angeles to work extensively with her record label to complete her debut album, The Fame, and to set up her own creative team called the Haus of Gaga, modeled on Andy Warhol's The Factory. The Fame was released on August 19, 2008, and reached number one in Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK, as well as the top five in Australia and the US. Its first two singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face", reached number one in the United States, Australia, Canada and the UK. The latter was also the world's bestselling single of 2009, with 9.8 million copies sold that year, and spent a record 83 weeks on Billboard magazine's Digital Songs chart. Three other singles, "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)", "LoveGame" and "Paparazzi", were released from the album; the lattermost reached number one in Germany. Remixed versions of the singles from The Fame, except "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)", were included on Hitmixes in August 2009. At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, The Fame and "Poker Face" won Best Dance/Electronica Album and Best Dance Recording, respectively.