International pop star, model, and recent Vogue Beauty cover girl BLEONA, shares her unbelievable journey, breaking barriers for Albanian women including Dua Lipa, Rita Ora and Bebe Rexha.
BLEONA is having a major moment. She has new music coming out produced by Timbaland, and this year made headlines on the red carpet of the Grammy Awards & Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party, landed the cover of Vogue México’s Vogue Belleza, and this fall will become the face of a global Balmain Beauty campaign, followed by another Vogue cover for its September fashion issue in Czechoslovakia.
Born and raised in communist Albania, where she remembers standing in line for bread as a child, BLEONA went on to become one of her country’s biggest stars, selling millions of records and performing for crowds of 100,000. Her career eventually brought her to Hollywood, where she scored a No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart, starred on Bravo’s “Euros of Hollywood,” appeared in films opposite Nicolas Cage and Aaron Eckhart and collaborated with Timbaland.
Now, she’s reclaiming the music that started it all.
When BLEONA moved to Los Angeles to build an English-language career, she deliberately removed much of her Albanian catalog from digital platforms, including videos with 50-60 million views each, effectively erasing the digital history of the career that made her famous.
She’s now re-recording and reimagining 20 of those songs for two new visual albums while releasing new English-language music, including an upcoming EP produced by Timbaland.
At a moment when Albanian women are an undeniable force in global pop, BLEONA is bringing every chapter of her career together with a new mission: to globalize Albanian music.
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