American singer-songwriter and activist Ani DiFranco was BOTD in 1970. Born in Buffalo, New York, she began playing in local bars at nine and was writing her own songs by her teens. She attended Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts, moving out of home at age 15 and becoming an emancipated minor. In 1989, aged 19, she started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, largely to avoid corporate control over her work. She released her debut self-titled album in 1990, playing all instrumentals and vocals herself, recording the album in her home and overseeing the album’s artwork, marketing and distribution. She quickly developed a cult following in the indie rock and contemporary folk scene, touring extensively and releasing an album each year. Following in the protest song tradition of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, her lyrics frequently addressed social injustice, matched by her off-stage protests of the death penalty and the Gulf War, and her support of women’s rights, abortion and gay marriage initiatives. Many of her songs, including The Million You Never Made, The Next Big Thing and Napoleon drew on her unhappy early encounters with music industry scouts. Her 1997 live album Living in Clip attained gold status, peaking at 59th place on the Billboard 200 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for the song Shy. Her 1999 album Fellow Workers, recorded with folk singer Utah Phillips, was nominated for Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 2003, DiFranco supported Dylan on the Australasian leg of his Never Ending Tour. The following year, she won the Grammy for Best Recording Package for the album Evolve. Via Righteous Babe, she has produced and released albums by indie musicians including Sara Lee, Bitch and Animal, Andrew Bird and Anaïs Mitchell. DiFranco came out as bisexual in her early 20s, referencing her relationships with men and women extensively in her music. In a 2019 interview, she expressed a preference for the term “queer”, explaining that “bisexual always sounded very medical, like something you do to a frog in 9th grade science.” She was briefly married to her sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist, and married her producer Mike Napolitano in 2009, with whom she has two children.