Joanne Stefani Germanotta (born March 20th, 1986 in New York, United States), best known by her stage name Lady GaGa, is an American singer-songwriter and dance-pop/electronica musician signed to Interscope Records.

Lady GaGa was born in March 1986, in New York to an Italian family. She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart School and, as a little girl, she remembers singing into a plastic tape recorder to the likes of Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson. By age 4, Lady Gaga had taught herself to play the piano by ear, and when she was a teenager she penned her first song. When she was just 14, she was playing open mic nights at New York’s Bitter End, and by the age of 17 she had been one of 20 kids in the world to get early admission to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

Lady Gaga started working the local Lower East Side club scene, performing then-hits like "Beautiful Dirty Rich" while donning her unique stage outfits. When she was 20 she started working for Interscope Records and was busy writing songs for other musical groups, such as The Pussycat Dolls. Lady GaGa also submitted 2 songs to Britney Spears with only one being used as a bonus track, "Quicksand".

On April 8, 2008, she released her debut single, "Just Dance", which went on to reach number one in Australia, Canada and the U.S aswell as number one in the UK.