Monseeka
Pamela Leesi Peter, known to the world as Monseeka, is a Nigerian singer-songwriter, writer, and multidimensional artist from the Ogoni tribe in Rivers State, Nigeria. She was born and bred in Port Harcourt.
She also holds the title of the 39th Miss Nigeria, crowned in the country's official national pageant in 2015.
During her reign, she served as a cultural ambassador, trained in Nonviolent Conflict Resolution under Dr. Bernard Lafayette at Emory University in Atlanta, served as an Air Peace ambassador, and was honoured with the chieftaincy title Gberebia Tuaka of Bodo City.
A trained photographer, she studied at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. Her personal project "With Love From The Shadows" earned recognition significant enough that one of her lecturers used it as a teaching reference for advanced students. It established what would become a signature of her practice: interior states made visible, the self as both subject and seeker.
She shot commercially for six years before stepping back to focus fully on music and personal creative work.
Monseeka officially began her music journey in 2020 with the release of Finders Seekers, a 4-track debut EP produced by Nigerian producer and artist Tchaka, that mapped her path of self-discovery with an intimacy that felt less like a debut and more like a confession.
Since then, she has released a body of singles including Coconut Water, Over The Radar, and Running With The Tide. Much of this work has been crafted in close collaboration with Nigerian producer and sound engineer Bigfootinyourface, a wildly creative, multi-passionate producer whose long body of work and instinct for sound has made him a natural and recurring creative partner.
She has also collaborated with Eva Alordiah, one of Nigeria's finest female rappers, appearing on the widely celebrated Focus Focus Focus, with Eva also featuring on Monseeka's own Don't Be Late.
She has repeatedly stated that she is a writer before anything else, and that identity runs through everything she makes. Her lyrics, her wordplay, the conceptual depth of her images all point to someone who thinks in language first.
Monseeka is deeply influenced by the storytelling and lyricism of J. Cole, Lana Del Rey, and Damian Marley. She grew up on a diet of old school music, reggae, and dancehall, with Damian Marley being a formative influence on her relationship to wordplay and rhythm.
Her sound is still in active evolution, circling Afrofusion, alternative, dancehall, and soul.
Her music explores freedom: the pursuit of it, the discomfort of it, the strange beauty of becoming someone you have not met yet.