Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll (born: February 2, 1977)known simply as Shakira, is a Colombian singer-songwriter, musician, record producer, dancer and philanthropist who emerged as a musical prodigy in the music scene of Latin America in the mid-1990s.
Born and raised in Barranquilla, Colombia, Shakira revealed many of her talents in school as a live performer, demonstrating her vocal ability with rock and roll, Latin and Middle Eastern influences with her own original twist on belly dancing, which she learned from her Lebanese grandmother. Shakira is a native Spanish speaker and also speaks fluent English, Portuguese, Italian,and some Arabic.
After a series of commercial flops with local producers on her first two albums and little-known outside Colombia, Shakira decided to produce her own brand of music: in 1995 she released 'Pies Descalzos', which brought her great fame in Latin America and Spain and marked Shakira as a musical phenomenon.
But 1998's '¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones?' remains most essential album of the artist. Since that time she began to gain more fans in non-Spanish-speaking countries like Turkey, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and especially the United States. In 2001, with the heavy rotation of the video "Whenever, Wherever" on MTV and VH1, she broke through into the English-speaking
world with the release of Laundry Service, which sold over twenty million copies worldwide.
She is also the highest-selling Colombian artist of all time, having sold more than 60 million albums worldwide, according to BMI.She is also the only artist from South America to reach the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100, the Australian ARIA chart, and the UK Singles Chart.
