Donna Dada is a DJ Who Never Gave Up

The Vancouver-based DJ and producer finally finds her stride after a three decade love-hate-love relationship with raving and performing.

by Mark McNulty

Photo by Michael Benz

Published on January 15, 2025

After shelling UK bass music to a twilight crowd at Bass Coast Festival, Donna Dada timidly backs away from the DJ decks and looks at the ground, as if she doesn’t deserve the wild cheers coming from the audience. Behind her on stage, her friends will have none of it. They push her forward and egg her on, so she swaps her headphones for a burnt orange beret before lifting her head, waving, hiding a grin, and receiving her figurative flowers.

Sheena Jardine-Olade, whose DJ moniker alludes to Caribbean slang, performs rave music across Canada with a genre palette that includes garage, breakbeat, jungle, and bass. She’s received recognition from rave royalty like DJ Flight and opened for stars like Sherelle. She’s a fixture in her local cultural scene, both as a DJ and as a planner with the City of Vancouver’s Cultural Spaces initiative, where she helps other musicians and artists find space to live, thrive, and present.

Yet Donna Dada’s journey–fighting inner demons, fainting on stage, facing down misogyny, and fading away for years–has been far from glamorous. After decades in music, only now is Jardine-Olade stepping into her stride and reaping rewards worthy of the work she’s put in.

“I talked myself out of a lot of great opportunities,” she tells RANGE from inside the Bass Coast artist lounge, the day following her performance. Speaking off the cuff with a disarming sense of humour, Jardine-Olade is open about her struggles with misogyny, anxiety and depression. While not unheard of in music, these challenges are not often discussed outside industry circles.

“I didn’t quite understand how to navigate a world where my value wasn’t seen until it was like a sexual exchange,” she says, describing her early DJ career in Ontario’s jungle scene, which was the largest outside the UK in the 1990s. After growing up playing punk rock drums and hearing Caribbean music in her household, Jardine-Olade was enraptured when she discovered jungle in the sweaty basement room of a house music party. “I felt like every cell in my body took a sigh. It made so much sense, and I felt so much understanding and acceptance.”

Yet this sense of acceptance wouldn’t last, and Jardine-Olade would have to chase it from scene to scene, city to city. In the DJ scene at the time, “perfectionism” was required of the women, but not of the men, and this exacerbated her anxiety. “If I made one mistake, whether it be social or technical I’d be berated for it, which my self esteem as a younger woman could not necessarily handle,” she says. The intersection of racism and misogyny, labeled “misogynoir” by writer Moya Bailey, was and is common in jungle.

This drove Jardine-Olade from DJing and raving and back to punk rock, although she didn’t quite fit in there either. Eventually, she returned to the rave after moving to Alberta. Hyperkinetic jungle was fading and the brooding sound of dubstep was ascendant. Sheena met some new mates and co-founded Canada’s first dubstep night in Calgary in 2009, and began DJing again.

Although she was now performing regularly in North America and even a bit in Europe, Jardine-Olade couldn’t outrun her anxiety. “I would DJ and if I made one mistake, I would cry about it three weeks later,” she says. “The anguish I was facing afterwards from the mental gymnastics of beating myself up was not worth the joy that I felt DJing.”

In hindsight, Jardine-Olade can have more than one good laugh about those days. The first time she met Andrea Graham – aka The Librarian, a DJ known for being the co-founder of Bass Coast – the two were playing a gig together. “I was so nervous that I passed out on the decks. I had a full on panic attack and fainted,” Jardine-Olade says with incredulous laughter. “I remember being on the floor and hearing the mix go out, and like reaching out, fixing the mix and then passing out again.”

Running the risk of regular panic attacks would drive plenty of performers underground, so Jardine-Olade, understandably, faded away again.

Meanwhile, gender imbalance persisted in jungle and drum and bass, and one effort to address this imbalance actually drew Jardine-Olade back to the decks. The influential British DJ, broadcaster and radio producer DJ Flight had founded EQ50 in 2018 to fight for fair representation in drum and bass.

“[EQ50] made a shirt of all the women who influenced jungle in North America, and my name was on it with Anna Morgan, Mizeyesis, all these people I looked up to,” says Jardine-Olade. “I was like you know what, we gotta get back on the horse.”

Since then, she has been saying “yes” to every opportunity, even if it scares her, and plenty have been rolling in. Jardine-Olade says she’s also been working on her mental health and that she’s less apprehensive asserting all parts of herself, especially at places like Bass Coast. Of Trinidadian and Nigerian heritage, she is passionate about celebrating the beauty of black culture in all kinds of spaces. Stirring around the artist lounge, she introduces herself to Magugu, another musician of the Nigerian diaspora living in Cardiff, Wales. “Ahhh, you was the one playing all that UK bass yesterday,” Magugu says, as the two exchange wide grins.

It’s fortunate Donna Dada eventually returned to DJing – but how many talented women of colour never did? How many never found a safe space in electronic music to begin with? “Representation matters,” Jardine-Olade says. “I want a little Black girl that’s sitting somewhere, who maybe doesn’t think electronic music is her speed or she thinks she should listen to this or that, to say ‘Shit, I’m gonna play some drums and play some jungle,’ you know?”