Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam (; born 18 July 1975), known professionally as M.I.A. (; an initialism for both "Missing in action" and "Missing in Acton"), is a British rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and activist. Her music combines elements of alternative, dance, electronic, hip hop and world music with electronic instruments and samples.
Born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, M.I.A. and her family moved to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka when she was six months old. As a child, she experienced displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which made the family return to London as refugees when M.I.A. was 11 years old; the war had a defining influence on M.I.A.'s artistry. She started as a visual artist, filmmaker and designer in 2000, and began her recording career in 2002. One of the first acts to come to public attention through the Internet, she saw early fame as an underground artist in early 2004 with her singles "Sunshowers" and "Galang".
M.I.A.'s first two albums, Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), received widespread critical acclaim for their fusion of hip hop, electronic, and world music influences. The latter's single "Paper Planes" (co-produced by at-the-time partner Diplo) peaked at number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards. Her third album, Maya (2010), was preceded by the single "Born Free" and an accompanying controversial music video/short film. Maya debuted within the top ten of the album charts in the United States, Finland, Norway, Greece and Canada. Her fourth studio album, Matangi (2013), spawned the single "Bad Girls", which won accolades at the MTV Video Music Awards. Her fifth album, AIM (2016), was met with a critical and commercial decline. She guest performed alongside Young Thug on Travis Scott's 2020 single "Franchise", which peaked atop the Billboard Hot 100, and released her sixth studio album Mata (2022) two years later, which spawned the single "The One".
M.I.A.'s accolades include two American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) awards and two MTV Video Music Awards. She is the first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award and Grammy Award in the same year. She was named one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone, and one of the 100 most influential people of 2009 by Time. Esquire ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. According to Billboard, she was one of the "Top 50 Dance/Electronic Artists of the 2010s". M.I.A. was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to music.
Life and career 1975–1999: Early life M.I.A. was born Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam on 18 July 1975, in Hounslow, London. She is the daughter of Arul Pragasam, a Sri Lankan Tamil engineer, writer and activist, and his wife, Kala, a seamstress. M.I.A.'s first name is derived from the Hindu goddess, Matangi. When M.I.A. was six months old, her family moved to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, where her brother was born. There, her father adopted the name Arular and became a political activist and founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), a political Tamil group affiliated with the LTTE. The first 11 years of M.I.A.'s life were marked by displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War. Her family went into hiding from the Sri Lankan Army, and she had little contact with her father during this period. She has described her family as living in "big-time" poverty during her childhood but also recalls some of her happiest memories from growing up in Jaffna. She attended Catholic convent schools such as the Holy Family Convent, Jaffna, where she developed her art skills—painting in particular—to work her way up her class.
Due to safety concerns, M.I.A.'s mother moved with her children to Madras in India, where they lived in a derelict house and received sporadic visits from their father, who was introduced to the children as their "uncle" in order to protect them. The family, minus Arular, then resettled in Jaffna temporarily, only to see the war escalate further in northeast Sri Lanka. During this time, the primary school of nine-year-old M.I.A. was destroyed in a government raid.
A week before M.I.A.'s 11th birthday in 1986, she returned with her mother and siblings to London, where they were housed as refugees. Her father arrived on the island and became an independent peace mediator between the two sides of the civil war in the late 1980s–2010. M.I.A. spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years living on the Phipps Bridge Estate in the Mitcham district of south London, where she learned to speak English, while her mother brought the children up on a modest income. M.I.A. entered the final year of primary school in the autumn of 1986 and quickly mastered the English language. Her classmates had difficulty pronouncing her first name so her aunt suggested that she use the nickname "Maya". Hers was one of only two Asian families on the estate at the time, in an atmosphere she has described as "incredibly racist."
While living in England and raising her children, M.I.A.'s mother became a Christian in 1990 and worked as a seamstress for the Royal Family for much of her career. She worked from her home in London's Tooting area. M.I.A. had a difficult relationship with her father, due to his political activities in the 1980s and complete absence during much of her life. Prior to the release of the first album, which M.I.A. had named after her father, he emailed her: "This is Dad. Change the title of your album. I'm really proud. Just read about you in the Sri Lanka Times. Dad." She chose not to change the album title. M.I.A. attended the Ricards Lodge High School in Wimbledon. Following high school, she attended Central Saint Martins, gaining admittance through unconventional means despite not having formally applied, she said "I got the name of the head of the art department and just rang him up every single day." She graduated with a degree in fine art, film and video in 2000.
2000–2002: Visual art and film While attending Central St Martins College, M.I.A. wanted to make films and art depicting realism that would be accessible to everyone, something that she felt was missing from her classmates' ethos and the course criteria. At college, she found the fashion courses "disposable" and more current than the film texts that she studied. She told Arthur magazine "[Students there were] exploring apathy, dressing up in some pigeon outfit, or running around conceptualising ... It missed the whole point of art representing society. Social reality didn't really exist there; it just stopped at theory." She cited "radical cinema" including Harmony Korine, Dogme 95 and Spike Jonze as some of her cinematic inspirations during film school. As a student, she was approached by director John Singleton to work on a film in Los Angeles after he had read a script she had written, though she decided not to take up the offer. For her degree, M.I.A. prepared her departmental honours thesis on the film CB4.
M.I.A. befriended students in the college's fashion, advertising and graphics departments. She met Justine Frischmann, front woman of the British band Elastica, through her friend Damon Albarn at an Air concert in 1999, and Frischmann commissioned M.I.A. to create the cover art for the band's 2000 album, The Menace, and video document their American tour. M.I.A. returned to Jaffna in 2001 to film a documentary on Tamil youth, but was unable to complete the project because she encountered harassment. In 2001, M.I.A.'s first public exhibition of paintings after graduating took place at the Euphoria Shop on London's Portobello Road. It featured graffiti art and spray-paint canvasses mixing Tamil political street art with images of London life and consumerist culture. The show was nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize and a monograph book of the collection was published in 2002, titled M.I.A.. Actor Jude Law was among early buyers of her art.
2003–2005: Musical beginnings and Arular
M.I.A. cites the radio broadcasts she heard emanating from her neighbours' flats in the late 1980s as some of her first exposures to her earliest musical influences. From there, she developed an interest in hip-hop and dancehall, identifying with "the starkness of the sound" in records by Public Enemy, MC Shan and Ultramagnetic MCs; and the "weird, distinct style" of acts such as Silver Bullet and London Posse. In college she developed an affinity for punk and the emerging sounds of Britpop and electroclash. M.I.A. cites The Slits, Malcolm McLaren and The Clash as major influences.
By 2001, M.I.A. designed the cover for Elastica's last single "The Bitch Don't Work", and went on the road with the band to video document their tour. The tour's supporting act, electroclash artist Peaches, introduced M.I.A. to the Roland MC-505 and encouraged her to make music, a medium in which M.I.A. lacked confidence. While holidaying together in Bequia in the Caribbean, M.I.A. began experimenting with Frischmann's MC-505. She adopted her stage name, "M.I.A.", standing for "Missing In Acton" during this time. In her 2012 book she writes, "M.I.A. came to be because of my missing cousin. I wanted to make a film about where he was since he was M.I.A. (Missing in Action) in Sri Lanka. We were the same age, went to the same schools growing up. I was also living in Acton at the time. So I was living in Acton looking for my cousin missing in action." Of her time in Bequia, she said "I started going out to this chicken shed with a sound system. You buy rum through a hatch and dance in the street. They convinced me to come to church where people sing so amazingly. But I couldn't clap along to hallelujah. I was out of rhythm. Someone said, 'What happened to Jesus? I saw you dancing last night and you were totally fine.' They stopped the service and taught me to clap in time. It was embarrassing". Returning to West London, where she shared an apartment with Frischmann, she began working with a simple set-up (a second-hand 4-track tape machine, the MC-505, and a radio microphone), composing and recording a six-song demo tape that included "Lady Killa", "M.I.A.", and "Galang".
In 2003, the independent label Showbiz Records pressed 500 vinyl singles of "Galang", a mix of dancehall, electro, jungle, and world music, with Seattle Weekly praising its a cappella coda as a "lift-up-and-over moment" evoking "clear skies beyond the council flats." File sharing, college radio airplay, and the rise in popularity of "Galang" and "Sunshowers" in dance clubs and fashion shows made M.I.A. an underground sensation. M.I.A. has been heralded as one of the first artists to build a large fanbase exclusively via these channels and as someone who could be studied to re-examine the internet's impact on how listeners are exposed to new music. She began uploading her music onto her MySpace account in June 2004. Major record labels caught on to the popularity of the second song she has written, "Galang", and M.I.A. was eventually signed to XL Recordings in mid-2004. Her debut album, to be titled Arular, was finalised by borrowing studio time.