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Arewà Basit

5 listings in 2 named rooms, over the last three years

As both a creative and model, Arewà has become a vital voice at the intersection of trans identity, Black aesthetics, and futurist performance.

On her Archive EP (2026) Arewà weaves together ambient soul, experimental R&B, and new-wave gospel into a Black trans folk-sound all her own, crafting an emotional cartography of ancestry and becoming. The EP includes previously released songs “Fluid,” “I’ll Wait,” and “Crystal,” and moves through a dreamlike arrangement of analog synths, layered harmonies, and ambient percussion, centering Arewà’s hypnotic voice as both witness and instrument. “I wanted the project to serve as a record of everything I’ve been through as an artist, a performer, and person – not as an act of nostalgia, but as proof,” Arewà says. “It’s about making peace with the versions of myself that never got to speak, and hold up my own experiences as a mirror for the listener.”

The rest of it — four more paragraphs

“The project came from a need to preserve what I couldn’t find anywhere else: my own joy, my own contradictions, my own archive,” says Arewà. “It’s a living document, and it’s still being written.”

Arewà’s musical work arrives amid a wave of international recognition across art, fashion, and performance. Many fans first got to know Arewà on the groundbreaking eighth season of MTV’s Are You the One in 2019. In 2024, she was immortalized in a celebrated portrait by artist Amy Sherald titled “Trans Forming Liberty” as part of her “American Sublime” exhibition, which debuted at SF MoMA and traveled to New York’s Whitney Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Arewà’s portrait was featured on the cover of The New Yorker in summer 2025 after it faced potential censorship in a planned exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C..

In the fall of 2025, Arewà was featured in the cast of the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway production Prince F*****, continuing to explore themes of queer embodiment and liberation on stage. She also appears in Geena Rocero’s short film Dolls (2025), executive produced by Lily Wachowski (The Matrix), which is currently on the festival circuit, further expanding Arewà’s presence across film and performance.

Whether on stage, on screen, in fashion and beauty campaigns, or through her sonic endeavors, Arewà’s practice offers a radical invitation to witness transformation in real time.

Their Resident Advisor profile, in full and unedited.

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The nights

Who they play with

Five nights on the books, and no name on more than one of them.

158 people have stood on one of these bills; none has stood on two.

The nights, the rooms and the bills are the listings themselves. The biography is Resident Advisor's. Nothing on this page was written for it.