Nina Kraviz

Before she was mixing acid lines into 3am sets at Berghain, Nina Kraviz was fixing teeth. That's not a rumor cooked up for a press bio: she trained and worked as a dentist in Moscow while running a Friday night residency and hosting a local radio show back home in Irkutsk. Few artists in techno have a backstory that swings that hard between clinical precision and chaos, and it still shapes how people talk about her, nearly two decades on.

Early Life and Path Into Music

Kraviz grew up in Irkutsk, a city in Siberia closer to Mongolia than to Moscow, where she got hooked on house music through radio broadcasts in the mid-1990s. She later moved to Moscow to study dentistry, qualifying and working in the field for several years while electronic music stayed a parallel obsession rather than a backup plan. During the early 2000s she wrote for a local fanzine, DJed a weekly residency, and hosted radio shows, the kind of unglamorous groundwork most touring DJs never have to talk about.

The turning point came via the Red Bull Music Academy. She was accepted into the 2005 edition in Seattle but couldn't get a visa in time, so she attended the following year's session in Melbourne instead, a detour that connected her with a wider circle of producers and DJs outside Russia. By 2008 she was running a regular night at Propaganda in Moscow, and her demos eventually found their way to Jus-Ed, who put out her breakout track "Voices" on his Underground Quality label. Rekids, run by Radio Slave, followed with "Ghetto Kraviz" and the "I'm Gonna Get You / Pain in the Ass" single, both of which did serious damage on dancefloors and set up her self-titled debut album, released on Rekids in February 2012.

Sound and Style

Kraviz has never sat comfortably inside one genre box, and that's arguably the whole point of her. Her sets move between raw acid, stripped electro, deep house, and full-throttle techno, often stitched together with hardware she's programming live rather than a pre-planned USB stick. She's known for a husky, half-spoken vocal style that turns up on her own productions, and for a DJing approach that prioritizes tension and surprise over tidy genre coherence. It's an attitude that's made her as divisive as she is influential: detractors call the unpredictability indulgent, while a large chunk of the scene treats her as one of the few headline-level DJs still willing to wrongfoot a festival crowd on purpose.

That restlessness runs through her catalogue too. The 2015 DJ-Kicks mix for !K7 pulled in Goldie and Aphex Twin's Polygon Window alongside her own material, and her 2016 fabric 91 mix leaned harder into acid, electro, and IDM textures. In 2021 she stretched even further afield, contributing original material to the Cyberpunk 2077: Radio soundtrack, scoring in-game radio stations rather than a dancefloor.

трип, treats, and the Label Story

Kraviz launched трип (pronounced "trip") in December 2014, after ending up with a surplus of tracks while digging for material for her DJ-Kicks mix. The label opened with a double-EP concept release, The Deviant Octopus, pairing her own productions with Terrence Dixon, Bjarki, and Steve Stoll, and it's since become one of the more consistently strange and hardware-heavy outposts in techno, covering everything from acid and hardcore to ambient detours, as Bandcamp Daily documented in its label profile.

In 2026 she opened a second imprint, treats, pitched as трип's "younger, bratty sister label" and openly uninterested in staying inside one genre lane, as Electronic Groove reported at launch. The debut release, treats 001, dropped in February and paired Brazilian producer João Lágrima de Ouro with MC Pogba on one side and Rio de Janeiro's MC Nick on the other, built around baile funk and regional Brazilian club sounds Kraviz had been championing in her sets. RTS.FM covered the treats label's Brazilian funk turn in more depth, and it's arguably the most interesting curveball of her career as a label boss: a Siberian-born techno DJ using her platform to push favela funk to a European club audience.

Career Highlights

Kraviz picked up Best Female Artist (Underground) at the 2018 International Dance Music Awards and has placed in DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs poll every year since 2018. Her showing in the 2026 edition, where she landed at number 31 on the back of strong Beatport streaming numbers and a packed festival calendar, is broken down in our DJ Mag Top 100 2026 recap.

Her 2026 touring calendar has been especially heavy. She's held down a recurring slot in the Pyramid party's lineup at Amnesia Ibiza, a residency built around the club's Sunday-into-Monday slot that's become one of the season's most talked-about bookings, which we cover in our piece on her Amnesia Ibiza Pyramid residency. In July she headlined a one-off collaboration between Junction 2 and fabric at London's Boston Manor Park, sharing top billing with Jeff Mills alongside Marcel Dettmann and DJ Hell, a pairing we broke down in our Jeff Mills and fabric Junction 2 write-up. For the fuller picture of where she played and when across the year, see our 2026 world tour dates roundup and the season-closing 2026 recap.

FAQ

Where is Nina Kraviz from?

She was born and raised in Irkutsk, a city in Siberia, Russia, before moving to Moscow as a young adult.

Is it true Nina Kraviz trained as a dentist?

Yes. She studied dentistry in Moscow and worked in the field for several years while building her music career on the side, a background frequently referenced in her press coverage and interviews.

What is трип (Trip) Recordings?

трип is the record label Kraviz founded in December 2014, known for hardware-driven techno, acid, and hardcore releases from herself and a rotating cast of collaborators.

What is treats, and how is it different from трип?

treats is Kraviz's second label, launched in 2026 as a genre-agnostic sister imprint to трип. Its debut release drew on Brazilian funk and baile funk rather than straight techno.

Has Nina Kraviz won any major awards?

She won Best Female Artist (Underground) at the 2018 International Dance Music Awards and has ranked in DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs poll every year since 2018, including a number 31 placement in 2026.

related on rts.fm

• Nina Kraviz's 2026: New Label, Ibiza, and a World Tour→
• DJ Mag's 2026 Poll Closes Soon, Here's Kraviz's History→
• Where to Catch Nina Kraviz on Her 2026 World Tour→
• Inside Nina Kraviz's Sunday Residency at Amnesia Ibiza→
• Why Nina Kraviz Just Launched a Brazilian Funk Label→
• Nina Kraviz and Jeff Mills Shared a Bill at Fabric→