Nicki Minaj was born Onika Tanya Maraj in St. James, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, and raised in Queens, New York City, New York. She grew up in a troubled family with a father who was a drug addict who later changed after he checked into rehab and started going to church. Minaj went to LaGaurdia High School and studied singing and acting.

Early Life

Minaj was born Onika Tanya Maraj on December 8, 1982, in Saint James, Trinidad and Tobago, and moved with her family to Queens, New York, when she was 5 years old. Minaj's father was a severe drug addict with a long history of violence. At one point, he set fire to the family's home in a failed attempt to kill Minaj's mother. Those early struggles, Minaj has said, helped fuel her drive to rise above the life her parents knew. "I've always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind," she told Details magazine, "because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn't be. I thought, 'If I'm successful, I can change her life.'"

To reach that point, the young Minaj developed personas for herself that would allow her to reinvent herself. An early incarnation was "Cookie," then came "Harajuku Barbie" before finally settling on Nicki Minaj. "Fantasy was my reality," she has said. Minaj clearly had a knack for performance. At the age of 12, she authored her first rap, then went on to delve into acting at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, the school that inspired the movie Fame. But her acting career didn’t take off, and she took up a range of steady jobs, including waitressing at Red Lobster, where she was fired for being rude to customers.

Music career

Minaj entered the music business as a backup singer for local aspiring rap singers in New York City. She included videos of her work on her Myspace page, which was seen by a local record label. Minaj eventually came to the attention of rapper Lil Wayne, and the two worked on some mixtapes (recordings), the first of which, Playtime Is Over, appeared in 2007. As other mixtapes were released, Minaj’s exposure grew, and the next year she was named Female Artist of the Year at the Underground Music Awards. In 2009 she signed with Young Money Entertainment, the label founded by Wayne; the label would release numerous hits by Wayne, Minaj, and Drake. She scored her first Grammy Award nomination in 2010 for the song “My Chick Bad,” a collaboration with Ludacris.