Brooklyn-based DJ and immigrant rights and climate activist Thanushka Yakupitiyage, better known as DJ Ushka, builds alternate realities with sets that mix Bollywood and baile funk, bachata, and Shakira.
She performed at this summer's Planet Brooklyn with a soundsystem, a loudspeaker conglomeration that can be heard throughout an entire street party. The practice originated in Kingston, Jamaica, and is typically associated with dancehall and other Caribbean styles of music. (You'll see a lot of them at the West Indian Day Parade.) She told me that the one she used was built by her friend, the musician Anik Khan, in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka.
Yakupitiyage, who currently works on sustainable policy initiatives at the Surdna Foundation, said she started DJing to be part of queer people of color in New York finding community on the dance floor.
"In 2011, I came into DJing when I was doing immigrant and refugee rights work," Yakupitiyage told me. She is an immigrant herself, originally from Sri Lanka and Thailand, who moved to the U.S. when she was 18 to attend college in Massachusetts. After graduating in 2007, she moved to New York City. "As an immigrant, I've experienced all of the difficulties of what it means to be able to stay in and make New York my home."
As she worked on immigrant support campaigns in the city, she began to see the club as a place of refuge: "I joke that some people go to church or temple, I go to the club."
She quickly realized that while the New York club scene of the 2010s had a dearth of women of color, immigrants, and queer people, that was changing fast. Party producers "with a sort of political analysis based on the issues that I was working on" were popping up, fulfilling, as she put it, "the need for joyful spaces when we live in a really chaotic time."
She cut her teeth at parties like QUE BAJO!? by DJs Uproot Andy and Geko Jones, and queer parties like Azucar; SWEAT, a party run by Khane Kutzwell; and, eventually Papi Juice, whose organizers she says are now "like family."
Since Yakupitiyage has been working as a multi-disciplinary artist on projects and parties for more than a decade, I asked her what her wildest dreams were for a new era of New York City culture.
"It's very, very difficult to be a full-time artist or DJ in New York," Yakupitiyage said. "I'd like to see the City really think about how they can create opportunities, expand grant opportunities for artists, and incorporate nightlife cultural workers as a part of broader artistic endeavors."
Here's where the DJ who can do it all is partying in the next two weeks: