Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. An influential figure in popular music, she is known for her image reinventions, flamboyant fashion, and versatility across the entertainment industry. With estimated sales of 124million records, she is one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
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 yielded a string of successful singles, including "Just Dance", "Poker Face", and "Bad Romance", which made her one of the few artists with at least three Diamond-certified songs in the US. Her second studio album, Born This Way (2011), explored electronic rock and techno-pop and sold 1.1 million copies in the US in its 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 person to win an Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Grammy Award in one year. Gaga returned to her early sound with the pop-oriented albums Chromatica (2020) and Mayhem (2025), which respectively included the number-one singles "Rain on Me" and "Die with a Smile". She also continued to explore jazz with Love for Sale (2021), her second and final album with Bennett, and the soundtrack Harlequin (2024).
Gaga has seven number-one albums on the Billboard 200 and six number-one songs on the Billboard Hot 100. She is the first female artist with four singles that each sold at least 10million copies globally and holds the record for the most-attended concert by a woman. The highest-paid female musician in 2011, she has received 16 Grammy Awards, 22 MTV Video Music Awards, 2 Golden Globe Awards, a Sports Emmy Award, 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 Born This Way Foundation, which supports the wellness of young people.
Life and career 1986–2004: Early life Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on March 28, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.Birth details:
Her parents are Cynthia Louise (), a philanthropist and business executive, and Joseph Germanotta, an Internet entrepreneur; both have Italian ancestry. According to Gaga, her parents came from lower-class families and worked hard for everything. They raised Gaga and her younger sister, Natali, in an upper-middle-class Catholic family on the Upper West Side.Family background details: From age 11, Gaga attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Catholic school on the Upper East Side. She has described her high-school self as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" and somewhat insecure. She considered herself a misfit and was mocked for being provocative and eccentric.
At age four, Gaga began playing the piano when her mother insisted that she become "a cultured young woman". She took piano lessons and practiced throughout her childhood. The lessons taught her to learn music by ear, which she 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. She 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 10 years. Her screen debut was a background appearance in the 2000 music video for the AC/DC song "Stiff Upper Lip". Gaga unsuccessfully auditioned for New York theater productions; she appeared in a 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.
In 2003, Gaga gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, a music school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. There, she improved her songwriting skills by writing essays on art, religion, social issues, and politics, including a thesis on the 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 a restaurant customer on MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show.
In a 2014 interview, Gaga discussed being raped at age 19 by her producer, and undergoing emotional and physical therapy for the trauma. She later revealed that following the assault, her rapist dropped her off pregnant near her parents' house because she was sick and vomiting. Gaga has post-traumatic stress disorder which she attributes to the rape; she said the trauma has changed her as a person and will never leave her.
2005–2007: Career beginnings In 2005, Gaga recorded two songs with rapper Melle Mel for an audiobook accompanying the Cricket Casey 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 Gaga to music producer Rob Fusari. He collaborated with Gaga, helping her develop songs and compose new material. He said they began dating in May 2006, and claimed he was the first person to call her "Lady Gaga", which was derived from the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga". According to Fusari, the name was coined when he attempted to call her "Radio Ga Ga" in a text message, with his phone's spell checker autocorrecting "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 at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively and, after approval from his boss Antonio "L.A." Reid, Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September2006. She was dropped from the label three months later, a decision which Reid later said was the biggest mistake of his life. Following this, Gaga began performing at neo-burlesque shows, and said these represented freedom to her. During this time, she met the 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 also 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, which had been 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, 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, the singer Akon was impressed with Gaga's singing ability 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 sister company of Def Jam), to form a joint deal by having Gaga also sign with his own label KonLive Distribution, and described her as his "franchise player". According to Gaga, some radio stations found her early music too "racy", "dance-oriented", and "underground" for the mainstream market, to which she responded: "My name is Lady Gaga, I've been on the music scene for years, and I'm telling you, this is what's next."
2008–2010: Breakthrough with The Fame and The Fame Monster By 2008, Gaga had relocated to Los Angeles 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. Gaga collaborated with the songwriter-producers RedOne and Martin Kierszenbaum on The Fame, which was released on August 19, 2008 by Cherrytree Records, an Interscope imprint established by Kierszenbaum. The album reached number one in Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK, as well as the top five in Australia and the United States. Its first two singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face", reached number one in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. "Poker Face" was also the world's best-selling single of 2009, with 9.8 million copies sold, 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,Single releases from The Fame:
with "Paparazzi" reaching number one in Germany. Remixed versions of the singles from The Fame, except "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)", were included on Gaga's extended play (EP) Hitmixes in August 2009. At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, The Fame and "Poker Face" won Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Recording, respectively. Gaga was the most awarded artist at the 2010 Brit Awards, winning in three categories.
Following her opening act on the Pussycat Dolls' 2009 Doll Domination Tour in Europe and Oceania, Gaga headlined her worldwide The Fame Ball Tour, which ran from March to September 2009. While traveling the globe, she wrote eight songs for The Fame Monster, a reissue of The Fame. The new songs were also released as a standalone EP on November 18, 2009. The first single, "Bad Romance", was released one month earlier and was number one in Canada and the UK, and number two in Australia, New Zealand and the US. "Telephone", with Beyoncé, followed as the second single from the EP and became Gaga's fourth UK number one. Its third single was "Alejandro", which reached number one in Finland; its music video was deemed blasphemous by the Catholic League. Both "Telephone" and "Alejandro" reached the top five in the US. The video for "Bad Romance" became the most watched video on YouTube in April 2010. That October, Gaga became the first person with more than one billion total YouTube views.