AmaLee

AmaLee is a voice actress and singer who has won a devoted fan following for her English-language interpretations of songs from anime and video games. Born Amanda Lee on March 13, 1992, she was a serious fan of Japanese animation and video games by her early teens, and in 2006 she began posting homemade videos of her covers of tunes popular with anime followers and gamers. In 2011, Lee was the grand prize winner of AX Idol, a singing competition affiliated with Anime Expo, a convention for anime fans held annually in Los Angeles. Soon Lee was doing voice work professionally, dubbing English-language versions of the shows Ladies Versus Butlers, K-On, and Squid Girl, while also voicing characters for video games such as Battle High 2 and Burn Your Fat with Me. As Lee’s fame grew, so did her fan following, and as she continued to post videos of herself singing online (using the names LeeandLie and AmeLee), by 2017 she had more than 870,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, and her videos had been viewed over 232,000,000 times. In early 2017, AmaLee released her debut album, Nostalgia, which brought together English-language versions of 12 songs beloved by gaming and anime obsessives. Over the next few years, Lee followed it with successive volumes of the same series which, by end of the decade, had risen to Nostalgia VII. ~ Mark Deming