her legal surname is not grande, her brother had a career before she did, and her grandmother has a billboard chart credit. the family is unusually load-bearing here.
the short answer
her full legal name is ariana grande-butera. her mother is joan grande, chief executive of a marine communications manufacturer; her father is edward butera, a graphic designer, and they separated when she was a child. her older half-brother is frankie grande, an actor and producer who was a public figure before she was. the family is italian-american, with sicilian and abruzzese roots she has never been quiet about.
the name
grande is her mother's surname and butera is her father's; the legal name carries both. she uses grande professionally, which is ordinary — but it is worth knowing because the number of pages confidently reporting that "ariana grande" is a stage name invented for television is not small, and it is not.
her parents
joan grande is the chief executive of hose-mccann communications, a manufacturer of marine communication and safety systems — which is about as far from the entertainment industry as a parent gets, and is part of why the early-career narrative of a manufactured child star never quite fitted. edward butera is a graphic designer and photographer based in florida. they separated when she was around nine.
she has spoken publicly, more than once, about the difficulty of the relationship with her father in her teens and about its later repair. that is her account rather than reporting, and this page does not go further into it than she has.
frankie grande
her older half-brother, born 1983, is an actor, producer, dancer and television personality. he had a broadway and off-broadway career and a season of big brother behind him before his sister was a household name — a detail that inverts the usual celebrity-sibling story, and one of the reasons a theatre career was never a strange idea in that house.
the 2018 fragrance frankie is named after him and marketed as unisex, which is the outlier in her fragrance line and by some distance the least commercially successful thing in it.
nonna
marjorie grande — nonna to everybody, including on the record — closes ordinary things, the final track of eternal sunshine, with a spoken passage about staying with someone who is good to you.
she is the only non-musician credited on any of the albums, and the credit made her the oldest living person to appear on the billboard hot 100. it is the single best fact in this entire section of the site.
italian-american, and specifically sicilian
both sides of the family are italian-american, with roots in sicily and abruzzo. she has been consistently loud about the sicilian half in a way that is unusual for an american pop star, and it turns up in the family names, in the food references and in the fact that her grandmother's voice ended up on a number-one album.
questions people ask
what is ariana grande's real name?
ariana grande-butera. grande is her mother's surname and butera is her father's; she uses grande professionally.
who are ariana grande's parents?
joan grande, chief executive of the marine communications manufacturer hose-mccann, and edward butera, a graphic designer. they separated when she was around nine.
does ariana grande have siblings?
one older half-brother, frankie grande, born in 1983. he is an actor and producer and was a public figure before she was.
what nationality is ariana grande?
american, born in boca raton, florida. her family is italian-american on both sides, with sicilian and abruzzese roots.
who is nonna on eternal sunshine?
marjorie grande, her grandmother, who speaks the closing passage of ordinary things. the credit made her the oldest living person to appear on the billboard hot 100.