Ariana Grande

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ariana Grande-Butera was born on the 26th of June 1993, in Boca Raton, Florida, and by age eight she was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a Florida Panthers hockey game. That same year, a chance encounter on a cruise ship changed the direction of her life: Gloria Estefan heard the young girl perform at a karaoke lounge and offered a compliment that Grande later credited with inspiring her to pursue music seriously. The girl who had already played Annie at the Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater and sung with South Florida's Philharmonic, Florida Sunshine Pops and Symphonic Orchestras would go on to become, according to Guinness World Records, the "Princess of Pop".

  What does it take to move from a Nickelodeon sitcom to the Grammy stage, then to an Academy Award nomination, all while building a fragrance empire worth over a billion dollars in global retail sales? How does a performer who once dyed her hair red every other week for a television role become the most-streamed female artist of an entire decade on Spotify? And what happens when that career is interrupted by one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in British history? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Boca Raton to Broadway

  ›

  Joan Grande, the Brooklyn-born CEO of Hose-McCann Communications, a marine equipment manufacturer the Grande family had owned since 1964, raised Ariana alongside her older half-brother Frankie Grande after her parents separated when she was around eight or nine years old. The family's roots were Sicilian and Abruzzese Italian, and their move from New York to Florida preceded Ariana's birth.

  Before she reached her teens, Grande was already performing with orchestras, acting in community theater, and attending Pine Crest School and later North Broward Preparatory. She played the title character in Annie with the Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater, and also appeared in their productions of The Wizard of Oz and Beauty and the Beast. Her maternal grandmother, Marjorie Grande, was a close presence throughout that childhood.

  In 2008, Grande traveled to New York and was cast as cheerleader Charlotte in the Broadway musical 13. When she first arrived in Los Angeles to meet with managers shortly afterward, she announced that she wanted to record an R&B album. Her managers, by her own account, met that ambition with skepticism: "'Um, that's a helluva goal! Who is going to buy a 14-year-old's R&B album?'" That question would take the better part of a decade to answer.

• 3. Cat Valentine and Republic Records

  ›

  In 2009, Grande was cast in the Nickelodeon series Victorious alongside her 13 co-star Elizabeth Gillies. She played Cat Valentine, a character the show described as "adorably dimwitted", and had to dye her hair red every other week for the role, damaging it in the process. The show premiered in March 2010 to 5.7 million viewers, the second-largest audience for a live-action series in Nickelodeon's history at the time. The second season premiere in April 2011 drew 6.2 million viewers, making it the show's highest-rated episode.

  Grande used her time on set to teach herself. She made recordings of herself singing covers of Adele, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and uploaded them to YouTube. A friend of Monte Lipman, CEO of Republic Records, came across one of those videos, forwarded the links to Lipman, and Lipman signed her to a recording contract. The pop career had found its opening through a social media side project.

  While still filming Victorious, Grande released the promotional single "Put Your Hearts Up" in December 2011, a track she later disowned for its bubblegum pop sound. She also appeared in Greyson Chance's music video for "Unfriend You" and voiced the title role in the English dub of Snowflake, the White Gorilla. After Victorious ended its run in February 2013, Grande starred alongside Charlene Tilton and Neil Patrick Harris in a pantomime-style production of A Snow White Christmas at the Pasadena Playhouse, and then joined Jennette McCurdy on Sam & Cat, the iCarly and Victorious spin-off in which their characters became roommates running an after-school babysitting business.

• 4. A Four-Octave Voice

  ›

  Grande has been described by critics as a soprano with a four-octave vocal range extending into the whistle register. Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that her voice "can be silky, breathy or cutting, swooping through long melismas or jabbing out short R&B phrases; it's always supple and airborne, never forced." Composer and playwright Jason Robert Brown wrote in a 2016 Time magazine article that no matter how much she might be underestimated, "you are going to open your mouth and that unbelievable sound is going to come out."

  Her primary vocal influences are Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. She described Carey as "literally my favorite human being on the planet" and said that Houston and Carey "pretty much cover" her vocal inspirations. She was also influenced by Destiny's Child, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, and Madonna, and has posted videos of herself singing songs from Dion's 1997 album Let's Talk About Love. She named Imogen Heap as her all-time favorite musician, songwriter, and producer.

  Grande learned to sound engineer and produce her own vocals, having been taught to use the digital audio workstation Pro Tools by rapper Mac Miller. Collaborator Justin Tranter noted that Grande is deeply involved "from the writing to the vision to the storytelling and to even engineering and comping her own vocals." Music producer Savan Kotecha revealed that he and Grande were listening to Lauryn Hill when creating Sweetener, paying close attention to Hill's approach to chord changes. Grande's enunciation drew criticism on her earlier recordings, something she acknowledged in 2015; critics later noted a marked improvement on Eternal Sunshine, attributing the clearer diction to intensive vocal training for the Wicked films.

• 5. Chart Records and Streaming Dominance

  ›

  Yours Truly, released on the 30th of August 2013, debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with 138,000 copies sold in its first week. It was a retro-inspired pop and R&B record with a sound influenced by 1950s doo-wop, created with the help of songwriter and producer Babyface. Lead single "The Way", featuring Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller, debuted at number ten on the Hot 100 and peaked at number nine for two weeks.

  With My Everything in 2014, Grande became the youngest woman at the time to debut with over 400,000 downloads in a week, selling 438,000 digital copies of lead single "Problem" in its opening week. She joined Adele as the only female artists to hold three top-ten singles simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist, with "Problem", "Break Free", and "Bang Bang" all charting at once. "Bang Bang", the collaboration with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj, was later certified diamond by the RIAA in May 2024, making it the first all-female collaboration to reach that threshold.

  The record-breaking accelerated further with Thank U, Next, released on the 8th of February 2019. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 360,000 album-equivalent units, Grande's largest sales week ever. The album broke records for the largest streaming week for a pop album and for a female album in the US, with 307 million on-demand streams, and was the only non-hip-hop title among the twenty largest US album streaming weeks at the time. "Thank U, Next" spent seven non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Hot 100, while "7 Rings" spent eight, making Grande the third female artist with multiple number-one debuts, after Mariah Carey and Britney Spears. She later occupied the top three positions on the Hot 100 simultaneously with "7 Rings", "Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored", and "Thank U, Next", becoming only the second artist to do so since the Beatles accomplished the feat in 1964.

  By 2020, Grande had become the most-streamed female artist of all time on Spotify, surpassing Rihanna, a record she held for over two years. As of April 2026, she has over 63 billion streams on the platform across all credits. Seven of her songs appeared in Apple Music's "500 Most-Streamed Songs Of All Time" list, with "7 Rings" and "Thank U, Next" at numbers 19 and 22 respectively.

• 6. Manchester and One Love

  ›

  On the 22nd of May 2017, Grande's concert at Manchester Arena ended in catastrophe. An Islamic extremist, motivated by Muslim casualties from US intervention in the Syrian Civil War, detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb at the City Room as audience members were leaving. The Manchester Arena bombing caused 22 deaths and injured over a thousand more.

  Grande suspended the remainder of her Dangerous Woman Tour. Rather than step away entirely, she organized and headlined One Love Manchester, a televised benefit concert held on June 4, which raised $23 million to aid the bombing's victims and their families. The concert featured Liam Gallagher, Robbie Williams, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and other artists performing alongside her.

  The Manchester City Council recognized her response by naming Grande the first honorary citizen of Manchester. Later that year, she was reported to have declined an honorary UK damehood. The tour resumed on June 7 in Paris and concluded in September 2017. The experience directly shaped the personal nature of her next two albums, Sweetener and Thank U, Next, both of which delved into themes of trauma, recovery, and self-reclamation. Grande and YouTube later collaborated on a four-part docuseries titled Ariana Grande: Dangerous Woman Diaries, which captured behind-the-scenes footage from the tour including moments from One Love Manchester, debuting on the 29th of November 2018.

• 7. Wicked and the Acting Career

  ›

  Grande was cast as Galinda Upland in the two-part film adaptation of Wicked in November 2021, after auditioning five times for the role. She began taking acting and singing lessons months before the audition because she wanted the part "so badly". She was credited under her birth name, Ariana Grande-Butera, the name she had when she first saw the stage musical at age ten.

  The first part, Wicked, was theatrically released in November 2024 and grossed $759 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing musical adaptation film of all time. The second part, Wicked: For Good, followed in November 2025 and grossed $540 million, making it the third-highest-grossing musical adaptation. Grande's performance and comedic timing earned praise from critics, along with nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, the 82nd and 83rd Golden Globe Awards, the 78th British Academy Film Awards, and multiple Critics' Choice and Screen Actors Guild categories.

  Both films' soundtracks were co-billed to Grande. The albums debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 139,000 and 122,000 units respectively, tying for the highest debut for a soundtrack to a stage-to-film adaptation. Grande and co-star Cynthia Erivo's rendition of "Defying Gravity" won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards. She and Erivo also opened the 97th Academy Awards ceremony with a medley of "Over the Rainbow", "Home", and "Defying Gravity". Ahead of her debut, Grande had appeared in the political satire Don't Look Up in December 2021, which broke the record for the biggest viewership week in Netflix history at the time. In 2027, she is set to make her London stage debut opposite Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey in Marianne Elliott's Barbican Theatre production of Sunday in the Park with George.

• 8. Beyond the Music

  ›

  Grande's business ventures extend well past recording studios. Her fragrance line has earned over a billion dollars in global retail sales, and she launched the cosmetics brand R.E.M. Beauty as an extension of that commercial presence. In 2020, Forbes named her the highest-earning woman in music, placing her 17th overall on the Celebrity 100 list with $72 million for that year.

  On social media, Grande was the first woman to surpass 200 million followers on Instagram and held the record as the most-followed woman on the platform from February 2019 to January 2022; she remains the sixth-most-followed individual on the platform. Her YouTube channel has over 57 million subscribers and has accumulated over 31 billion views, with eight music videos surpassing one billion views and two surpassing two billion. She deleted her Twitter account in December 2021, explaining that the platform's reach made it difficult to communicate with fans in the way she intended, and that she wanted to prioritize her relationship to art and her fanbase.

  Outside of commercial activity, Grande has worked extensively with charitable organizations and advocates for animal rights, mental health, and gender, racial, and LGBT equality. She joined as a coach on the twenty-first season of The Voice in September 2021, becoming the highest-paid coach in the show's history at a reported $25 million for that season. Her upcoming eighth studio album, Petal, is set for release on the 31st of July 2026, preceded by the lead single "Hate That I Made You Love Me" on the 29th of May 2026. She will also embark on the Eternal Sunshine Tour, her first concert tour since 2019, with 41 arena shows across North America and England between June and September 2026.