You've probably seen that green mane behind the DJ booth, even if you can't recall the name. YouTube likes to serve it up late at night: an hour-long progressive house set filmed on a hotel rooftop in Ibiza or under a museum dome in Montreal. Anyone searching for her now as Miss Monique Prague will run into the first surprise right away. No Monique exists. The Ukrainian DJ's real name is Olesia Arkusha (the English Wikipedia gives the transliteration Alesia). According to the Housenest website, early in her career she and her partner decided her birth name would be too complicated for foreign audiences. They went through a few French names and settled on "Miss Monique."

The second surprise is even bigger. Most electronic music stars broke through with a hit, she broke through with the way she mixes. She recorded proper radio-style mixes, just sent them to YouTube instead of the airwaves. The girl who learned the ropes doing warm-up sets in a Kyiv club became a DJ who, in 2026, played Tomorrowland's main stage for the third year running and climbed to 61st place in the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs 2026 poll.

Miss Monique Prague: who is the DJ that YouTube built

Miss Monique is a Ukrainian DJ, producer and owner of the label Siona Records. She wasn't launched into the world by a single hit or radio play, but by years of patiently recorded streams.

She learned her craft the old-fashioned way. She started going to Kyiv clubs at sixteen and, according to an interview with DJ Mag, spent two years in the booth of the local Prime Club, which closed in 2012. She mostly played warm-ups, the opening sets before the headline act of the night. DJ Mag sees this as the reason she adapts so easily today to both a small club and a huge festival field. She started her career in 2011 and spent the first two years touring mostly around Ukraine.

Then came the streams. The Mind Games, MiMo Weekly and MiMo Radio series were built on a simple idea: take a classic radio mix and turn it into a carefully filmed video. The Dutch outlet Partyflock put it precisely when it wrote that, unlike most DJs today, she didn't become famous through production but through mixing. At home and in neighbouring countries she had already been known for a long time, but the global breakthrough came with the pandemic. According to her bio on the Amsterdam Dance Event website, the sets she streamed from her home studio during the lockdowns started going viral.

The numbers that resulted are unusual for a club DJ. The mix for the third anniversary of her label, filmed in Ibiza in June 2022, has over 20 million views according to her official bio. The English Wikipedia states that her most-watched videos reach as high as 24 million. An ordinary club set will never see that kind of audience.

And the hair? Her official bio describes it as a look that became iconic more or less by accident, and that fans now imitate. So at her events, green wigs and streaks are no exception at all.

How she sounds: progressive house that got harder

The foundation is progressive house, into which she mixes darker melodic techno and traces of trance. Her sets are built on gradual build-up and melody, not on a drop every three minutes.

The Sober Raver blog described it best: progressive house provides the skeleton, a gradually evolving arrangement, a rolling rhythm and transitions through which the set slowly opens up. Melodic techno adds darker colours, driving bass and dramatic synth lines. Anyone who thinks the word "techno" means just a hard beat gets an incomplete picture. Melody and a continuous emotional arc are the main thing for her.

At big festivals, the tempo can pick up quite a bit. But in an interview with DJ Mag she said she always comes back to her roots in progressive house. Among her idols you'll find John Digweed, Paul Oakenfold, Sander van Doorn and Carl Cox, but also Solomun and Black Coffee. That maps the space she moves in well: from classic British progressive to modern, denser grooves.

As a producer she has gradually built a catalogue that doesn't get lost in the crowd. The track Nomacita reached number one on Beatport's melodic techno chart. Her remix of Rush by Sied van Riel was the best-selling progressive house track on Beatport in 2022. Then came remixes for big names: Sorry by BLOND:ISH with Madonna, I Don't Wanna Wait for David Guetta and OneRepublic, and Beautiful People for Guetta and Sia. She has released on Armada, Drumcode, Black Hole Recordings and Tomorrowland Music.

2026 was a rich year for new material. According to her official website, she released Rajada with Agents of Time, Hot Sauce with Kapuchon and GLZ, and Ghosts with Nicolas Taboada and FRANCO BA. According to DJ Mag, Hot Sauce held the top spot on Beatport's Melodic House & Techno chart for four weeks. And on September 18th she released the track Beauty in Us with Robbie Williams via Cr2 Records, quite a leap into pop mainstream for a DJ who grew up on YouTube streams.

From a Kyiv apartment to Lisbon and Ibiza

The war didn't stop her career, but it marked it deeply. Since 2022 she has lived in Portugal, and in the meantime she has become one of the most visible faces of melodic electronic music.

After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, she had to flee with her family. According to Housenest, the first days they slept in cars in Kyiv, and in March they moved to the west of the country. Today she lives in Lisbon, and in event programs organizers describe her as an artist in exile who never wanted exile. She told DJ Mag that 2022 may have been a good year for her career, but she couldn't enjoy it, because her thoughts were constantly back home. She called it the hardest year of her life.

It's clear from interviews that this tension hasn't gone away. In her bio text for ADE she admits that when, two hours before a party, she reads that Kyiv has been bombed again, she can sit down and cry. And she's proud that at her concerts around the world, Ukrainian flags fly in the air just like hands.

She founded the label Siona Records in 2019 as a home for her own music and for young progressive producers. In 2024 it celebrated its fifth birthday, and the anniversary mixes filmed in Ibiza or Mykonos have become a tradition fans wait for every summer.

Meanwhile, stages kept piling up that she couldn't have dreamed of in Kyiv. Her set for Cercle at the Biosphere in Montreal from 2022 has six million views according to her bio. She has played Coachella, Ultra in Miami and EDC in Las Vegas, and in 2024 she debuted on Pete Tong's Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1. In 2025 she held a thirteen-week residency in the Club Room at Hï Ibiza, entered the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs poll as a newcomer at 75th place, and won Best Progressive/Melodic House DJ at the DJ Awards. In 2026 she extended her Hï Ibiza residency to seventeen Thursdays and jumped fourteen places in the DJ Mag poll.

A detail from Argentina shows just how big the interest in her is: according to her bio, after the Buenos Aires show was announced, ten thousand people tried to buy six thousand tickets, and they sold out in under two hours.

Biorhythm: a show people are talking about and arguing over

In 2026 she unveiled the audiovisual show Biorhythm, her most ambitious project yet. The audience embraced it enthusiastically, though part of the critics argue it turns the dancefloor into a cinema.

She never hid the plan. Already in her profile for DJ Mag Top 100 DJs 2025 she said that in 2026 she wanted to push her own show to a big, highly creative level. According to DJ Mag, the premiere took place on the Freedom Stage, Tomorrowland's second-largest stage, and the English Wikipedia gives the date as July 17, 2026. A week later she played Tomorrowland's main stage, for the third year in a row.

The concept pits real-time generated industrial visuals against organic, natural motifs. In a press release she summed it up by saying she hopes Biorhythm will show that "despite our industrial world, nature never disappears." According to EDMTunes, the show opened with a reworked version of her own track Concorde, continued with unreleased remixes including the Belgian nineties classic Age Of Love, and ended with the premiere of the single The Unknown featuring singer Delilah Montagu. Most of the tracklist belongs to her or to artists from Siona.

Not everyone applauded. The website Change Underground called the show the peak of overblown melodic techno spectacle and described how part of the crowd stood filming the visuals on their phones instead of dancing. That criticism isn't aimed at her alone, but at the entire wave of big visual sets. For the viewer, that's a useful guideline: if you mainly want to dance, you'll enjoy a club set more. If you want a visual experience, Biorhythm in a large venue makes sense.

Further stops of the show, according to DJ Mag, head to Buenos Aires, New York's Pacha and the Phantom club in Paris. Prague isn't among them.

What to listen to before you see her live

The fastest route to Miss Monique leads through full sets, not individual tracks. Here are five recordings that together give a good picture of how she sounds, past and present.

  • Siona Records: 3rd Anniversary @ Ibiza (2022) - her most-watched mix, filmed on a hotel rooftop in Ibiza. An ideal first introduction, melodic and more relaxed.
  • Cercle at the Biosphere in Montreal (2022) - the backdrop of a museum under a geodesic dome, and a set where fans first heard the track Veselka in large numbers, still unreleased at the time.
  • Veselka (Siona Records, 2024) - the name means "rainbow" in Ukrainian. According to her, it's the last track she finished in Kyiv before she had to leave because of the war. She opened her sets with it for a long time, and it wasn't released until January 2024.
  • Siona Records: VI Anniversary @ Ibiza (2025) - a more recent anniversary mix where you can hear the shift toward a denser sound.
  • Biorhythm footage from Tomorrowland (2026) - DJ Mag and her own channels have published clips from the premiere. Worth checking out if you're curious what today's big show looks like.

From her studio work, Nomacita, the Rush remix and the new track Hot Sauce are worth a listen. Anyone who plays Veselka followed by Hot Sauce will hear, within ten minutes, just how much her sound has shifted in two years.

Miss Monique Prague: where to watch for a date, and where to go for electronic music in the meantime

There's no Prague date for Miss Monique in our calendar right now. Keep an eye on her official channels for announcements, and in the meantime there are other places in Prague to catch electronic music.

For anyone searching for Miss Monique Prague, a simple rule applies: new dates will appear first on her official website missmoniquemusic.com and on her Instagram and YouTube channel (both under the name djmissmonique). Buy tickets from the organizer or their official reseller. If an event is missing from the club's or festival's website and is only offered by a foreign resale site, that's a warning sign.

Also watch out for mixed-up names. In our calendar you'll find Miss Petty, who has nothing to do with Miss Monique. In the fall she tours with Athena Chlebová, for example at the concert Athena Chlebová + Miss Petty at Dock Ostrava on October 29, 2026.

If you're drawn to electronic music in an arena setting and don't mind a harder sound, check out TECHMISSION presents HARDTECH The biggest hardtechno rave in cz, happening on March 6, 2027 at Tipsport Aréna Praha. To be honest, hardtechno is several notches harder than Miss Monique's melodic progressive house, so it's more of a tip for those who also have faster techno in their playlist.

For an ongoing overview, it's worth browsing the event calendar, which brings together club nights and big concerts in one place. The concerts section helps when you're looking for a specific date, and the festivals in Prague overview is especially useful in spring and summer, when electronic music moves outdoors. You'll find new names on the artists page.

Frequently asked questions

Is Miss Monique playing in Prague anytime soon?

We currently have no Prague date in our calendar, and Prague isn't among the announced stops for the Biorhythm show either. The safest bet is to follow her official website and Instagram, where new dates appear first.

What style of music does Miss Monique play?

Her foundation is progressive house, which she combines with melodic techno and occasionally traces of trance. Her sets build gradually and hold on to melody, though in recent years they sound harder and more danceable than her older YouTube streams.

Why does she call herself Monique when that's not her real name?

Her real name is Olesia Arkusha. According to the Housenest website, early in her career she and her partner agreed that her birth name would be too complicated for foreign audiences, and out of several French names they chose Monique. DJ Mag adds that she took on the stage name right as she was becoming known in Ukraine and neighbouring countries.

What should I start with if I don't know her at all?

Play the mix Siona Records: 3rd Anniversary @ Ibiza from 2022, then the track Veselka. The first shows her melodic side, the second adds a personal story along with a harder rhythm. If that hooks you, continue with her set for Cercle from Montreal.

Sources

  • Event TECHMISSION presents HARDTECH The biggest hardtechno rave in cz, Tipsport Aréna Praha, March 6, 2027 (kdykam.com, event page)
  • Event Athena Chlebová + Miss Petty, Dock Ostrava, October 29, 2026 (kdykam.com, event page)
  • Official Miss Monique website, missmoniquemusic.com (About section)
  • Wikipedia: Miss Monique (English version)
  • DJ Mag: Top 100 DJs 2025 and 2026, Miss Monique profiles; report on the Biorhythm premiere at Tomorrowland 2026; interview "Miss Monique: green light"
  • EDMTunes: articles about the Biorhythm show (June and July 2026)
  • Change Underground: critical commentary on the Biorhythm show
  • The Sober Raver: Miss Monique, The Long Road from Kyiv to the World's Dance Floors
  • Housenest: 10 facts about Miss Monique
  • Amsterdam Dance Event and Awakenings: Miss Monique profile
  • Partyflock: Miss Monique biography
  • Gray Area: Artist Spotlight Miss Monique
  • Savaya Bali: Miss Monique profile (official bio)
  • Rave Jungle: report on the release of the track Veselka (2024)