Lin-Manuel Miranda to Speak at Penn Commencement

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer behind the hip-hop Broadway hit Hamilton, will be the featured speaker at Penn’s 2016 commencement. The university made the announcement today.

“Miranda is one of the most innovative and stunningly brilliant artistic voices of and for our time,” Penn President Amy Gutmann said. “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.”

For Hamilton, Miranda wrote the play, music and lyrics and plays the title role. The musical opened on Broadway in 2015 following a sold-out run at New York’s Public Theater.

Here’s a CBS Sunday Morning feature on Miranda and the musical:

He’ll receive an honorary doctor of the arts degree. Others who will receive honorary degrees at the graduation ceremonies include Hawa Abdi, a Somali human rights activist and physician and Somalia’s first female gynecologist; Elizabeth E. Bailey, the John C. Hower Professor Emeritus of Business Economics and Public Policy in Penn’s Wharton School; David Brooks, the New York Times columnist; Renée Fleming, the Grammy-award winning opera singer, Sylvester James Gates Jr., a theoretical physicist known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity and superstring theory; Asma Jahangir, a human rights activist and lawyer and the founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; and Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist.

The commencement will be held Monday, May 16.