Name: Hawa
Age: 21
Hometown: Born in Berlin, and grew up in Guinea-Conakry and New York City
Now Lives: In a sunny, two-bedroom condo in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn
Claim to Fame: Hawa is a classically skilled queer rapper and generally vogue mannequin, who is maybe greatest identified for her 2019 music “My Love,” which was featured in an emotional scene in Michaela Coel’s HBO collection “I May Destroy You.” The placement not solely introduced her publicity, however aligned together with her artwork as a queer Black lady. “I love being a part of things that are impactful in a sense, and things that change people’s perception, so that’s why it’s important to me,” she stated.
Big Break: Hawa was accepted into the New York Philharmonic Very Young Composers Program at 10 and have become its youngest composer. She give up at 15 as a result of she needed to deal with R&B and indie music as a manner of expressing her sexuality. Two years later, she posted a snippet of her music to Instagram, which caught the consideration of Keenan MacWilliam, a inventive director and artist in New York. Through Ms. MacWilliam, Hawa bought signed with the file label 4AD. In 2020, she launched her debut EP “The One.”
Next Thing: Hawa is ending up her debut album, “Hadja Bangoura,” set for launch this summer season. She enlisted the producer Tony Seltzer to assist her craft an experimental mélange of R&B, soul, indie, pop, entice and New York drill rap. The album was impressed by her great-grandmother, who died earlier this 12 months. “She’s the person who made all the women in my family the strong, educated people that they are, and turned all of them into amazing human beings,” she stated. “So losing her is like losing a part of myself.”
Model Moves: For Hawa, vogue and music “go hand in hand, like eggs and bacon,” she stated. “When it came to me branching out into the fashion industry, it was really a bunch of designers who were fans of my art before we got to meet,” she stated. “Now, they’re fans of not only my art at this point but fans of me as a person.”
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