Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer and songwriter. Her music has been noted by critics for its stylized cinematic quality, its preoccupation with themes of tragic romance, glamour, and melancholia, and its references to pop culture, particularly 1950s and 1960s Americana.

Raised in Upstate New York, Del Rey moved to New York City in 2005 to embark on her music career. Following numerous projects including her debut studio album and the unreleased Sirens, Del Rey's breakthrough came after the viral success of her single "Video Games" in 2011. She would then sign with Interscope and Polydor later that year. Her major label debut Born to Die (2012) proved a success, spawning her first top-ten single on the Billboard Hot 100 with the Cedric Gervais remix of "Summertime Sadness". Since, Del Rey has released the US Billboard 200 number-one albums Ultraviolence (2014) and Lust for Life (2017) along with top-ten releases Paradise (2012) and Honeymoon (2015). She has received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album for both Paradise and Lust for Life.

Alongside her records, Del Rey's has contributed to a variety of film soundtracks including The Great Gatsby (2013), Maleficent (2014), and Big Eyes (2014), the last having gained her a Golden Globe nomination. Other significant collaborations include on The Weeknd's Starboy (2016) and Børns' Blue Madonna (2018).

Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born in New York City on June 21, 1985 to Robert England Grant, Jr., a Grey Group copywriter turned entrepreneur, and Patricia Ann "Pat" (née Hill), a former Grey account executive turned high school teacher. She has one younger sister, Caroline Grant, and one brother, Charlie. Her paternal grandfather, Robert England Grant, Sr. was a Kidder, Peabody & Co. investment banker, a vice president for Plough, Inc and Textron, and venture capitalist. She has Scottish ancestry from both her mother and father.

Grant grew up in Lake Placid, New York, and was raised Roman Catholic. She attended a Catholic elementary school and for one year, a high school where her mother taught. She began singing in her church choir when she was a child, where she was the cantor. At age fifteen, she was sent to Kent School by her parents to resolve a budding drinking problem. Her uncle, an admissions officer at the boarding school, secured her financial aid to attend.

After graduating, Del Rey was accepted to the State University of New York at Geneseo, but she decided not to attend and instead spent a year living on Long Island with her aunt and uncle while working as a waitress. During this time, Del Rey's uncle taught her how to play guitar, and she "realized [that she] could probably write a million songs with those six chords." Shortly after, she began writing songs and performing in nightclubs around the city under various names such as "Sparkle Jump Rope Queen" and "Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena." "I was always singing, but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously", Del Rey said. "When I got to New York City when I was eighteen, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn-I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point-and that was it."

The following fall, at age nineteen, she enrolled at Fordham University where she majored in philosophy, with an emphasis on metaphysics. She has said she chose to study the subject because it "bridged the gap between God and science... I was interested in God and how technology could bring us closer to finding out where we came from and why." According to Del Rey, she had trouble making friends in both boarding school and college. She lived in The Bronx while attending Fordham. Before graduating in 2008, she moved to North Bergen, New Jersey. She was also a Brooklyn resident for four years.

In college, Del Rey did volunteer work at homeless youth and drug and alcohol outreach programs, as well as helping paint and rebuild houses on an Indian reservation in Utah. She would cite this trip as integral in her decision to become a songwriter: "I remember exactly when I decided that I wanted to be a singer. I was in college, [and] we went to the Indian reservation. That day I realized that I had only two options: either making music or volunteering for a good cause. I chose the first option. If it [had] not [worked], I would [have] probably [done] social work in any small town."

On April 25, 2005, a seven-track extended play was registered under Elizabeth Woolridge Grant with the United States Copyright Office. The application title was Rock Me Stable with another title Young Like Me also listed. A second extended play, titled From the End, was also recorded under Del Rey's stage name at the time, May Jailer. Between 2005 and 2006, she recorded an acoustic album titled Sirens under the May Jailer project, which later leaked on the internet in mid-2012.

At her first performance in 2006 for the Williamsburg Live Songwriting Competition, Del Rey met Van Wilson, an A&R representative for 5 Points Records, an independent label owned by David Nichtern. In 2007, while a senior at Fordham, Del Rey submitted a demo tape of acoustic tracks titled No Kung Fu to 5 Points Records, who subsequently offered her a recording contract for $10,000. Del Rey used the money to relocate to Manhattan Mobile Home Park, a trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey, and subsequently began working with producer David Kahne, with whom she released a three-track EP titled Kill Kill in October 2008 as Lizzy Grant. She explained that "David asked to work with me only a day after he got my demo. He is known as a producer with a lot of integrity and who had an interest in making music that wasn't just pop." The album, however, was shelved, causing her to shift her focus: She began to work in community service. "Homeless outreach, drug, and alcohol rehabilitation-that's been my life for the past five years", she told Vogue UK in 2012. Her debut full-length album, titled Lana Del Ray, was released in January 2010. Her father, Robert Grant, helped with the marketing of the album, which was available for purchase on iTunes for a brief period before being withdrawn.

David Kahne, who produced Grant and previous label owner David Nichtern have both stated that Grant bought the rights back from her label, 5 Points, as she wanted it out of circulation to "stifle future opportunities to distribute it-an echo of rumors that the action was part of a calculated strategy. Del Rey met her current managers, Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, three months after Lana Del Ray and they helped her to get out of her contract with 5 Points Records, where, in her opinion, "nothing was happening." Shortly after, she moved to London, and moved in with Mawson "for a few years." When choosing her stage name, she said: "I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba - Lana Del Rey reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue." She has said her lawyers and managers made up the name Lana Del Rey and persuaded her to adopt it. On September 1, 2010, Del Rey was featured by Mando Diao in their MTV Unplugged concert at Union Film-Studios in Berlin.

After uploading them to her YouTube channel in 2011, Del Rey's videos for the songs "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" became viral internet sensations, and she was signed by Stranger Records to release "Video Games" as her debut single. She told The Observer, "I just put that song online a few months ago because it was my favorite. To be honest, it wasn't going to be the single but people have really responded to it." The song earned her a Q award for "Next Big Thing" in October 2011 and an Ivor Novello for "Best Contemporary Song" in 2012. The same month, she signed a joint deal with Interscope Records and Polydor to work on her second studio album Born to Die.

Del Rey built anticipation to the album by doing a number of live appearances, such as promotional concerts at the Bowery Ballroom and at the Chateau Marmont, and with performances at television shows such as De Wereld Draait Door, and Later... with Jools Holland. Del Rey also performed two songs from the album on Saturday Night Live on January 14, 2012 and received a negative response from critics and the general public. Del Rey's performance was defended by the evening program's guest host, actor Daniel Radcliffe, despite not having seen her performance.[58] She had earlier defended her spot on the program, saying: "I'm a good musician [...] I have been singing for a long time, and I think that [SNL creator] Lorne Michaels knows that [...] it's not a fluke decision." The following week on SNL, Kristen Wiig impersonated Del Rey where she humorously defended herself during Weekend Update.

At the 2012 MTV Europe Music Awards, Del Rey received nominations in the categories Best Alternative, Best Push, and Best New Act. Winning Best Alternative, Del Rey presented the award for Best Female to Taylor Swift. At the 2013 BRIT Awards, she won the award for International Female Solo Artist, making it her second BRIT Award to date. Her win surprised critics who highly anticipated Taylor Swift to win the award. In March 2013, she recited Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" for the French fashion magazine, L'Officiel Paris.

Del Rey's seventh single, "Dark Paradise", was released as a single in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on March 1, 2013. Del Rey won the ECHO Awards for Best International Newcomer and Best International Pop/Rock Artist on March 21, 2013. A music video for Del Rey's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel#2" was released on March 27, 2013. The following month, in April 2013, another self-produced video was released; it showed Del Rey and her boyfriend, Barrie-James O'Neil, covering "Summer Wine", by Lee Hazlewood. "Burning Desire" became available for purchase as a stand-alone download on March 19, 2013 as the second promotional single from Paradise; its music video was premiered the previous month on Valentine's Day of 2013.

After the release of Paradise, Del Rey penned the original song "Young and Beautiful" for the soundtrack of the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby with director, co-writer, and co-producer Baz Luhrmann. Following the song's release, it peaked at 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Del Rey's highest peak on the chart. However, shortly after its release to contemporary hit radio, the label prematurely pulled it and decided to send a different song to that format; on July 2, 2013, a Cedric Gervais remix of Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" was sent there; a sleeper hit, the song proved to be a success, surpassing "Young and Beautiful", reaching number 6 and becoming her first American top ten hit. The remix won the Grammy Award for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical in 2013. Alongside Paradise, Del Rey announced plans to launch a short film titled Tropico. Tropico was filmed in late June 2013 and directed by Anthony Mandler.

On November 22, 2013, an official trailer for Tropico was released; at the end of the trailer, it was announced that the film would be uploaded to Del Rey's official VEVO account on December 5, 2013. The short film premiered on December 4 at Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Before showing the film, Del Rey told the audience "I really just wanted us all to be together so I could try and visually close out my chapter before I release the new record, Ultraviolence". Journalists identified the phrase from the Anthony Burgess' dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), but reports were conflicting as to whether or not the title was stylized as one or two words. On December 6, 2013, an EP, also titled Tropico, was made available for purchase via iTunes; it includes the film itself along with the three aforementioned songs.

In October 2015, Del Rey announced that she planned writing material for her new record. She stated that her last two albums had a "Californian" sound, but if she were to make an album with a "New York" sound it would be a little harder, faster, more upbeat, and less dreamy. In January 2016, Del Rey was nominated with the "Favorite Female Artist" award at the People's Choice Awards, and she also received a Brit Award nomination for International Female Solo Artist, her third nomination in the category and fourth overall. In February and March 2016, Del Rey and her managers, respectively, officially revealed that she began working on her fifth studio album, just months after releasing her fourth.

In 2016, Del Rey performed on two songs on The Weeknd's third studio album Starboy. She provided uncredited backing vocals on "Party Monster" and was featured on an interlude entitled "Stargirl Interlude". "Love", the lead single off of Del Rey's fifth studio album, Lust for Life, was released on February 18, 2017. The music video was directed by Rich Lee. Soon after, Lust for Life was officially announced on March 29, 2017, when a trailer for the album was uploaded to Del Rey's Vevo channel. The album includes collaborations with Stevie Nicks and other artists, and was released on July 21, 2017. About the album, Del Rey stated "I made my first 4 albums for me, but this one is for my fans and about where I hope we are all headed." During a livestream in February 2017, Del Rey described the aesthetic of the album as having a "retro sensibility with a futuristic flair". She released the official cover art for Lust for Life on April 11, 2017. Her first collaboration, "Lust for Life" featuring The Weeknd, was released on April 19, 2017 as the second single from the album. Del Rey released the song "Coachella - Woodstock in My Mind" on May 15, 2017.

In 2010, Del Rey acted in a short film called Poolside, which she made with several friends on a reported budget of $400. On January 4, 2012, it was reported she had signed a deal with Next Model Management agency. H&M confirmed that Del Rey would be modeling and recording a cover version of the popular 1950s prom anthem "Blue Velvet" for their 2012 Autumn Campaign. H&M's 2012 Winter campaign, featuring Lana Del Rey, was released on October 12. This is the second H&M campaign Lana Del Rey is featured in. On August 22, 2012, executives announced that Del Rey would endorse their new Jaguar F-Type which was unveiled by Del Rey at the Paris Motor Show in September 2012. Adrian Hallmark, Jaguar's global brand director, explained their choice, saying Del Rey had "a unique blend of authenticity and modernity". The song "Burning Desire", which was initially available for immediate digital download upon pre-ordering Del Rey's third EP, Paradise, was later made available for purchase on Amazon.com and 7digital as a stand-alone download on March 19, 2013, one month after its music video hit YouTube. The song serves as the title track to a 13-minute promotional short film for the Jaguar F-Type, called Desire. The film, directed by Adam Smith, was produced by Ridley Scott and stars Damian Lewis.