About Tina Arena
Filippina Lydia "Tina" Arena AM is an Australian singer-songwriter, musician, musical theatre actress and record producer. She is one of Australia's highest-selling artists and has sold over 10 million records worldwide. Arena is multilingual, singing and recording in English, Italian, French and Spanish.
Arena has earned several international and national awards, including a BRIT Award, seven ARIA Awards and two World Music Awards for Best-selling Australian Artist . In 2001, she was awarded a BMI Foundation Songwriting Award by the American performance rights organisation for co-writing "Burn" with Pam Reswick and Steve Werfel. In 2011, Arena became the first Australian to be awarded a knighthood of the French National Order of National Merit, presented by the President of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, for her contributions to French culture, and ceremonially awarded by Frédéric Mitterrand, the Minister of Culture and Communication of France.
In 2015, Arena was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association ARIA Hall of Fame. On Australia Day, 26 January 2016, Arena was recognised in the Australia Day Honours and appointed a member in the General Division of the Order of Australia "for significant service to the music industry as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist, and as a supporter of charitable groups". In 2016 Arena was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia .
In March 2019, the Government of Australia appointed Arena as a board member of the Australia Council for the Arts for a three-year term.
Arena was born in the Melbourne suburb of Keilor East, to Giuseppe "Joe" Arena and Francesca "Franca" Catalfamo , Sicilian immigrants, in Melbourne on 1 November 1967. Giuseppe was a rural worker in Sicily and then a cane cutter in Cairns in 1955. By the following year he was a labourer in Melbourne and later worked for Victorian Railways.: 7 Arena grew up in Keilor East, Victoria with two sisters, Nancy and Silvana; As a child, she listened to Spanish, Italian and French songs that were in her family's record collection. At the age of six, she was the flower girl at her cousin Gaetano's wedding, and at the reception she urged her father to approach the host so that she could sing—Daryl Braithwaite's version of "You're My World"—it was her first public performance.
Arena's family call her Pina, which is her shortened first name. She changed her first name from Filippina to Tina, her stage name becoming Tina Arena, when she appeared as a child performer on the national television talent show Young Talent Time in 1976, at age 8. For secondary schooling, she attended a Catholic girls' college, St. Columba's College, Essendon, in Melbourne. Recalling her upbringing, Arena says, "It was a very Italian household, it was a very traditional household. There was a lot of love but there was a lot of discipline. And there was no room for pretentiousness. Really, there just wasn't."
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