[1] Lopez is one of only twenty-one people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award, nicknamed by Philip Michael Thomas in 1984 as the "EGOT".

[2] With a second set of competitive wins beginning with his June 27, 2010, Emmy and concluding with his March 4, 2018, Academy Award, he has broken his own 'fastest to complete' record, establishing a new fastest EGOT interval at 7 years and 8 months.

[3][6] Upon graduating from Yale, Lopez moved back in with his parents and brother in Greenwich Village, where he lived for four years until he was able to earn enough money writing songs for Theatreworks USA to rent an apartment of his own.

Their first project together, Kermit, Prince of Denmark, a Muppet parody of Hamlet, won the Kleban Award for lyrics, though The Jim Henson Company rejected the script, saying it did not have enough "kid appeal.

In January 2007, a musical adaptation of the Disney/Pixar film Finding Nemo, which Lopez co-wrote with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, opened at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park.

[14] The song was written in the style of a Broadway show tune, and parodied a scene from the musical The Producers to illustrate the story of a real-life hedge fund called Magnetar that made millions of dollars when the housing market collapsed.

On June 25, 2010, Lopez won his second Daytime Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition for his work on The Wonder Pets!

[16] Lopez composed a song for The Simpsons episode "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again" titled "Enjoy It While You Can" which aired on April 29, 2012.

Lopez and his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez wrote seven songs for Winnie the Pooh, released in 2011 by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

[20] In development for several years by Lopez and Anderson-Lopez, their romantic-comedy musical Up Here debuted August 9, 2015, at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.

[23] It was announced in late 2015 that Lopez would be writing original songs for the revival of the cult comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000.

[27] During his participation in the 1999 BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, Robert Lopez met and began dating lyricist Kristen Anderson.

[17][28] As described in a 2003 The New York Times profile, the pair, struggling in a cash-strapped post-college period that recalls the storyline of Avenue Q's Princeton and Kate Monster, "live[d] in Astoria, Queens, [drove] a 1989 Buick and survive[d] on fast food".