Like Selena Gomez and Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter got her start as an actress. She had some small movie and TV roles before starring in the Disney series
Girl Meets World in 2014 when she was 15. By this time she was signed to Disney's Hollywood Records and had released her first single, "
Can't Blame A Girl For Trying," written by a then-unknown Meghan Trainor. Carpenter released her first two albums while starring on the show, which ended in 2017.
Carpenter was very excited when she made her Broadway debut playing Cady Heron in Mean Girls on March 10, 2020, but it was short-lived: After two performances, the production was shut down due to the pandemic.
Despite the disappointment, she saw this period of silence as a blessing in disguise. It gave her the opportunity to work on her deeply personal album Emails I Can't Send, which ultimately propelled her to a new level of fame in 2022.
Carpenter's hair is blonde but her eyebrows are dark. She says that's her natural look.
She's allergic to apples and almonds, and has to be careful about what skin care products she uses. She says a foundation she applied once gave her eczema.
Sabrina Carpenter has done a lot of voice work, including on Disney shows Sofia The First and Phineas And Ferb. This runs in the family: her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson.
Carpenter started performing in the early years of social media and developed huge followings on Instagram, TikTok and other social networks. She's grateful for the way she can connect with fans on the socials, but also has to deal with the inevitable negativity. She finds that songwriting helps keep her grounded and away from the screens while giving her a healthy means of expression.
She's a Taurus, which accounts for her tenacity. "I've always just been very driven," she told
Who What Wear. "Some people like to call it stubborn. I like to say driven."
Growing up in the rural town of East Greenville, Pennsylvania, her family took in lots of stray cats. During the pandemic, Carpenter got two kittens that she named Benny and Björn, after Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba.
In 2017, she opened some shows on Ariana Grande's Dangerous Woman Tour. In 2023 she joined Taylor Swift on Swift's Eras Tour, which was huge because Carpenter idolized Swift growing up. "I feel so lucky to witness the magic that is you and this tour," she posted when it was over. "There is truly no one like you and there never will be!"
Her sister Sarah is a popular photographer with over a million followers
on Instragram.
Carpenter's music career was a slow build. Her fifth album, 2022's
Emails I Can't Send, was a breakthrough thanks to the hit "
Feather," but she leveled up in 2024 with two inescapable summer bops from her sixth album,
Short n' Sweet: "
Espresso" and "
Please Please Please." That September, she launched a headline tour with a show at Madison Square Garden.
An early inspiration was Christina Aguilera. When Carpenter was young, her mom played her a video of 9-year-old Aguilera performing on the TV talent show Star Search. "It was the main reason why I wanted to become a singer," she told Christina when they performed together in 2024 as part of Aguilera's Spotify special.
Carpenter credits her quiet upbringing in a rural Pennsylvania town for her imaginative streak. "Silence really curated my imagination from a young age," she explained to CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith. "I think it gave me the ability to be bored - and from boredom came ideas." That boredom, it turns out, was fertile ground for songwriting.
Carpenter is a huge fan of Abba, the Swedish pop group famous for '70s hits like "
Dancing Queen" and "
Waterloo."
"I don't know if there are any other artists in the world who make me so happy," she told Rolling Stone. "They just understood how to make fun music without it feeling cheesy or corny."
Some of her biggest fans are related to music legends, which gives her an in. For instance, Paul Simon's daughter Lulu is a big fan, and Dolly Parton has nieces and nephews that love Carpenter. Sabrina teamed up with Simon to sing his classic "
Homeward Bound" on
Saturday Night Live, and Parton joined her on a
countrified duet version of "Please Please Please."
