Biography | Katy Perry — The Glendale Halftime Show That Became Her Biggest Broadcast Stage

Katy Perry had already spent years filling arenas before 1 February 2015, but the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show placed her work inside a broadcast built to reach far beyond a concert audience. The performance took place at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, the public sports venue now known as State Farm Stadium. NFL records and Reuters independently place Perry at the stadium that Sunday, where she opened the show with Roar while riding a large mechanical lion across the field. She followed Roar with Dark Horse, brought Lenny Kravitz into I Kissed a Girl, moved through Teenage Dream and California Gurls, then gave Missy Elliott a substantial guest segment before closing above the field with Firework. Those choices compressed several versions of Perry’s career into one halftime production: the early controversy that attracted attention, the bright California imagery that defined her most commercially dominant period, and the motivational anthem that widened her audience. The guest appearances also prevented the program from becoming a simple greatest-hits medley, connecting Perry’s catalog to rock performance and to an older lineage of women in hip-hop. Reuters described the production as a spectacle of rapid costume and set changes, while the NFL’s own archive preserves the venue, date and sequence as part of the league’s official Super Bowl record. No audience total is needed to establish the scale, because the event itself was the championship game of the National Football League and the halftime show was designed as a national television centerpiece. The stadium carried the University of Phoenix name from its 2006 opening until 2018, when it became State Farm Stadium, so modern maps and signs use a name different from the one in contemporary coverage. The pin marks the public stadium building at 1 Cardinals Drive rather than an invented point on the field or along Perry’s moving performance route. The photograph was taken in August 2006 and shows the newly opened stadium exterior, making it direct venue context but not a photograph of the 2015 halftime show. For Perry’s biography, Glendale is the place where a career assembled through singles, videos and tours was condensed into one tightly controlled live production on popular music’s largest recurring television stage. Photo: McPHX, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; photographed 17 August 2006.