Kina Grannis American Guitarist Born 1985 in Mission Viejo

Early life

Kina Kasuya Grannis was born on 4 August 1985 in Mission Viejo, California, where she grew up. Her heritage is European on her father's side and Japanese on her mother's. She went to Capistrano Valley High School from 1999 to 2003 and then enrolled at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In her second year there, staff at the Thornton School of Music asked her to make an album for their music industry programme, which became Sincerely, Me. She graduated in 2007 with distinction in social science, with an emphasis on psychology, and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa academic society during her studies.

Career

In 2006 Grannis self-released two further albums, One More in the Attic and In Memory of the Singing Bridge. A song she recorded in 2007, "Ours to Keep", was played regularly on the daytime drama General Hospital. She opened a YouTube account on 14 November 2007 and posted "Message from Your Heart", which she entered in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. She won, and the prize included a recording contract with Interscope Records and a slot for her video during the commercial breaks of Super Bowl XLII. In January 2009 she left Interscope to work independently.

Her album Stairwells came out on 23 February 2010 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 139. Its song "In Your Arms" later received a stop-motion video made with about 288,000 jelly beans, released in November 2011 after roughly two years of work. In 2010 she appeared in the Wong Fu Productions miniseries Funemployed, and in 2011 she began her first world tour, followed by the In Your Arms Tour through Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. In March 2013 she gave a TEDx talk in Hollywood titled "Finding Community Through the Internet".

Elements, produced by Matt Hales of Aqualung, was released on 6 May 2014 and reached number 48 on the Billboard 200. Ahead of its release she ran a weekly video series on her channel called "Kina Mondays". She joined the crowdfunding site Patreon in April 2014. During the Elements tour in September 2015 she travelled to Indonesia, where she and her band were held by the authorities for 100 days because of a problem with their work visas, and were deported. She used part of that time to write two songs, "California" and "For Now".

In April 2017 she founded the label KG Records with her Patreon supporters, who funded and advised on her next album. In the Waiting was its first major release, on 29 June 2018. She also appeared as herself in the film Crazy Rich Asians that year. She began streaming on Twitch in 2020 and reached Partner status. Her album It's Hard to Be Human followed on 12 October 2021 and deals with her experience of infertility and IVF. In 2023 she formed the group people i like with her husband, the musician Imaginary Future, and the pair Mree and Henri Bardot. That year she and her husband issued a duets collection, I Found You, and their catalogues were acquired by Endurance Music Group.

She has worked repeatedly with Wong Fu Productions, including a lead role as Joanna Taylor in the YouTube Red series Single by 30 in 2016. She has also recorded cover songs with Boyce Avenue.

Recognition

Early in 2011 Sirius XM's CoffeeHouse channel named her its 2010 Singer-Songwriter Discovery of the Year following an online vote. Her YouTube channel is among the larger music channels on the platform, with about 1.7 million subscribers counted in March 2025.

Personal life

Grannis has two sisters, Misa and Emi, who sometimes appear in her videos and have joined her on tour. She married the musician Jesse Epstein, whom she met at high school, on 31 August 2013 in Los Angeles, and she used footage from the ceremony in her video for "My Dear". Their daughter was born in 2021.

She supports cancer research and has performed at Relay For Life events. In 2012 she started Run Team Kina, a fundraising project for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society that collected $71,886 that year.