Singer
Kina Grannis > O

Kina Kasuya Grannis (born August 4, 1985) is an American guitarist and singer-songwriter. She is half Japanese and half English, Irish, French, Scottish, Dutch and German. Grannis was the winner of the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. As a result of winning, she earned a recording contract with Interscope Records and had her music video played during the commercials of Super Bowl XLII. She recently won Best Web-Born Artist at the 2011 MTV O ... Music Awards. Her progress in the competition was covered in The Orange County Register and The Wall Street Journal. Grannis has also been featured on FOX News Los Angeles, Good Day L.A. and Yahoo!. Kina grew up in Mission Viejo, California, and it was here where her love for music began. In elementary school, she composed and submitted piano compositions to district art competitions. Soon afterwards, she began playing the violin, an instrument she would play throughout high school. By age 15, she started teaching herself the guitar and it was this instrument with which she fell in love. She attended Viejo Elementary School, Newhart Middle School and from 1999 to 2003 Capistrano Valley High School. Grannis enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles in 2003. Two years later, staff members of the University's Thornton School of Music asked her to produce an album in their music and music industry departments. That album, Sincerely, Me, was released the same year. In 2007, she graduated Summa Cum Laude in social science with an emphasis on psychology. While attending USC, she was inducted into academic societies Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. See more [+]