Born in Manhattan, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta better known as Lady Gaga, learned music at an early age and was performing onstage in New York City clubs by the time she was a teenager. She attended an all-girls school, Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Manhattan before going on to study music at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She studied at Tisch for two years before dropping out to manage her own career. After dropping out, she began transforming herself from Germanotta into Lady Gaga, her adopted stage name was derived from Queen’s song “Radio Ga Ga”. She created a character that came to occupy a unique space in the music world. Her fashion combined with her up-tempo, synthetic dance music and her edgy, theatrical performance to create stunning sounds and visuals. Indeed, while producing music, Lady Gaga also created her own sexually charged fashions replete with dazzling wigs and space-age bodysuits through her creative team Haus of Gaga.

R&B singer Akon discovered Gaga while she was performing a burlesque show that she created, called "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue." Impressed, Akon signed the performer to his label under the Interscope umbrella, Kon Live. Through 2007 and 2008, Gaga wrote and recorded her debut album, The Fame

During 2010 Lady Gaga proved to be one of the most commercially successful artists, with a sold-out concert tour (which had been launched to coincide with the release of The Fame Monster), while she also headlined Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival and played in front of a record 20,000 people at NBC’s Today show. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and was named by Forbes magazine as one of the world’s most powerful women, and she capped off 2010 by being named Billboard magazine’s artist of the year. After arriving at the 2011 Grammy Awards ceremony encased in a giant egg, Lady Gaga went on to claim honours for best pop vocal album (for The Fame Monster) and best female pop vocal performance and best short form video (for “Bad Romance”).

In addition to recording music, Lady Gaga made occasional film appearances, notably in Machete Kills (2013) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). She played a vampiric countess with no regard for life or suffering in the fifth season of the television show American Horror Story: Hotel (2015–16). For her performance in the anthology series, Lady Gaga received a Golden Globe Award. She also appeared in the sixth season, which aired in 2016. Lady Gaga garnered critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for her first lead role, a guileless up-and-coming singer-songwriter in the 2018 remake of the movie A Star Is Born. She cowrote most of that movie’s songs, many of which she performed with costar and director Bradley Cooper. The lead single, “Shallow,” won two Grammy Awards and the Oscar for best original song. In 2021 Lady Gaga appeared in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, which centres on the true story of the murder of Maurizio Gucci, who headed his family’s luxury fashion brand.

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