Ani DiFranco

Ani DiFranco is an American singer, guitarist, poet, and songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums and is widely considered a feminist icon.

DiFranco was born in Buffalo, New York, to Elizabeth and Dante DiFranco, who had met while attending MIT. She started playing Beatles covers at local bars and busking with her guitar teacher, Michael Meldrum, at the age of nine.

In 1989, DiFranco started her own record company, Righteous Records. Early in her career DiFranco worked with manager Dale Anderson, a writer for the Buffalo News, who started another record label called Hot Wings Records, after the two parted ways, that released similar sounding material. Her self-titled debut album was issued on the label in the winter of 1990. Later, she relocated to New York City, where she took poetry classes at The New School and toured vigorously for the next 15 years, essentially pausing briefly only to record albums. Righteous Records was renamed Righteous Babe Records in 1994.

Although much of DiFranco's material is autobiographical, it is often also strongly political. Many of her songs are concerned with contemporary social issues such as racism, sexism, sexual abuse, homophobia, reproductive rights, poverty, and war. In 2008, she donated a song to Aid Still Required's CD to assist with the restoration of the devastation done to Southeast Asia from the 2004 Tsunami. The combination of personal and political is partially responsible for DiFranco's early popularity among politically active college students, particularly those of the left wing, some of whom set up fan pages on the web to document DiFranco's career as early as 1994. DiFranco's rapid rise in popularity in the mid-1990s was fueled mostly by personal contact and word of mouth rather than mainstream media.

In 1998, she married sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist in a Unitarian Universalist service in Canada, overseen by folk singer Utah Phillips. DiFranco and Gilchrist divorced five years later.

DiFranco gave birth to a daughter, Petah Lucia DiFranco Napolitano, at her Buffalo home on January 20, 2007. She married the child's father Mike Napolitano, also her regular producer, in 2009. She and her husband currently reside in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.