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Award-winning composer Lin-Manuel Miranda to deliver speech at Penn commencement

His smash Broadway hit "Hamilton" explores American history through a fusion of hip-hop and showtunes.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer and star of the Broadway hit "Hamilton" and winner of a 2015 MacArthur “genius” grant, will deliver a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s commencement ceremony in May, 2016, the university’s press office announced Tuesday.

“Hamilton” explores American history through a fusion of hip-hop and showtunes. Miranda wrote the play, music and lyrics, earning a sold-out run at New York’s Public Theater. It went on to win 10 Lortel Awards in its Off-Broadway run, as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Musical and an OBIE for Best New American Play, among other awards.

The play has since been nominated for a 2016 Grammy.

“Miranda is one of the most innovative and stunningly brilliant artistic voices of and for our time,” Penn’s president Amy Gutman said in a statement. “As a lyricist, composer, playwright and actor, he has accomplished nothing short of remaking the great American artistic form of musical theater and telling the history of our founding through the most creative, evocative and thought provoking contemporary lens.”

“In doing so,” Gutman added, “he has woven bold stories of our lives that are transformative and provocative and inspire and challenge us to not be bound by convention. As Miranda's title character Hamilton raps, evoking Penn's own spirit: ‘I'm just like my country/ I'm young, scrappy and hungry/And I'm not throwing away my shot.’"

Miranda, 35, is the son of Puerto Rican parents. He will also receive an honorary doctorate in the arts from the university, alongside a handful of others:

  • physician Hawa Abdi
  • economist Elizabeth E. Bailey
  • journalist David Brooks
  • opera singer Renée Fleming
  • physicist Sylvester James Gates Jr.
  • Pakistani activist Asma Jahangir
  • neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel
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