Actress and singer Selena Gomez was born on July 22, 1992 in Grand Prairie, Texas. She is the daughter of Mandy Teefey and Ricardo Gomez Her mother is of part Italian ancestry, and her father is of Mexican descent. She was named after Tejano singer Selena, who died in 1995.
Accomplishments and Achievements
american singer and actress Selena Gomez has received many awards and nominations throughout her career. She rose to prominence for her lead role as Alex Russo on the Disney Channel television series Wizards of Waverly Place (2007–2012), earning her the ALMA Award and two times the Teen Choice Award for Best Comedy TV Actress, and three NAACP Image Awards nominations. She also won the Kids' Choice Award for Favorite TV Actress five times in a row. She currently holds the record for the most Kids' Choice Awards wins (12) for an individual.[1][2] Her performance in Another Cinderella Story (2008) garnered her a Young Artist Award. Gomez's debut solo album, Stars Dance, was released in 2013, and spawned the MTV Video Music Award for Best Pop Video-winning "Come & Get It". At the 2014 Teen Choice Awards, she was honored with the Ultimate Choice Award. With 18 wins, she is the fourth-most awarded solo artist in the awards' history. In 2015, Gomez released her second studio album, Revival, and was awarded the Chart-Topper Award at the Billboard Women in Music event. The following year, she won the iHeartRadio Music Award for Biggest Triple Threat and was nominated for two Billboard Music Awards, including Top Female Artist. She also won the American Music Award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist and was nominated for Artist of the Year. In 2017, Gomez was named Billboard's Woman of the Year. That year, she released the single "It Ain't Me", which was nominated for Top Dance/Electronic Song at the 2018 Billboard Music Awards. At the 2019 ceremony, the song "Taki Taki" received two nominations, including Top Latin Song, and won Song of the Year at the Latin American Music Awards. In 2020, Gomez released her third studio album, Rare. That same year, she was honored by The Latin Recording Academy as one of the Leading Ladies of Entertainment and was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time. Additionally, her beauty brand, Rare Beauty, was included in Time's 2024 list of the 100 most influential companies. Gomez starred in the HBO Max cooking series Selena + Chef (2020–2023), for which she won two MTV Movie & TV Awards and was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards. Revelación (2021), Gomez's first Spanish-language EP, was nominated for Best Latin Pop Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards, and received Latin Pop Album of the Year nominations from the Billboard Latin Music, Latin American Music and Lo Nuestro award ceremonies. The lead single, "De Una Vez", was nominated for a Latin Grammy Award. Gomez received critical praise for her performance as Mabel in the Hulu mystery-comedy series Only Murders in the Building (2021–present), which garnered her the Satellite Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy, as well as nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award, the Critics' Choice Television Award and two times the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series. She also won three People's Choice Awards, including Female TV Star of the Year, and was nominated for three Screen Actors Guild Awards. Gomez was nominated three times as producer for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series, marking her the most-nominated Latina producer in the category's history' history.[4] For her work on Coldplay's studio album, Music of the Spheres, as featured artist on "Let Somebody Go", she was nominated for Album of the Year at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. Her collaboration with Rema on the "Calm Down" remix worldwide records won the Top Afrobeats Song at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards and received five nominations. The song also won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Afrobeats Video and was nominated for Song of the Year. In 2024, Gomez's performance as Jessi in Emilia Pérez earned her the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. In addition, Gomez has earned several accolades for her philanthropic efforts and mental health advocacy work. She has also broken 16 Guinness World Records thus far.
Ideologies, principles, beliefs, and/or advocacy
Gomez has recently spoken about the fact that her paternal grandparents were undocumented. “It wasn’t for any reason that I didn’t share it before,” she says. “It’s just that as I started to see the world for what it is, all these things started to be like light bulbs going off.” Her grandparents came to Texas in a “back-of-the-truck situation,” Gomez tells me, “and it took them 17 years to get citizenship. I remember that being such a huge deal. My grandpa was working construction, hiring hundreds of people, and still they were living on the edge, covering up how scary it was.” Gomez remembers being a teenager, at a Shania Twain show in Vegas with her dad, when a stranger yelled that her dad was a wetback. “I started crying,” she says. “But my dad grabbed me and just walked away. I cried even more. I thought, I hate that my dad feels so depleted by this.” Over the past few years, Gomez started learning more about the immigration system, having conversations with friends who had firsthand experience with its bureaucratic snarls. In 2019, she served as an executive-producer for the Netflix series Living Undocumented. “My goal was to communicate that these people are not ‘aliens’; they’re not whatever names other people have given them. They’re humans—they’re people,” she says. The author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who wrote the dazzling, defiant 2020 book The Undocumented Americans about this very subject, tells me, “My dad was an undocumented delivery man on Wall Street, and he catered galas for the fanciest New York City families, and very important men sent him to the freight elevator with the trash because they didn’t think he was human.” She sent her book to Gomez because she felt a kinship—“another Latina young woman who was self-made and clever and beautiful and successful and kind, who struggled and reinvented herself and metabolized her suffering in her art”—and sensed that Gomez understood the elemental sin of this dehumanization. When Gomez championed the book, lending it her endorsement and speaking about it in interviews and on Instagram, it was “a special moment for thousands of Latinx youth, many of them undocumented and queer. They felt like she had our back. I felt like she had our back too.” Cornejo Villavicencio says that some of her most loyal readers now are Selenators. “And I love them fiercely.”