As the daughter of legendary producer and arranger Don Costa, Nikka was born with music encoded in her DNA. Growing up around the likes of Frank Sinatra (her godfather), Paul Anka, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among many other musical luminaries), she was already a child star in Europe and had sung on the White House lawn with Sinatra before she was old enough to enroll in middle school. She recorded her first single, a Christmas duet with famed Hawaiian singer Don Ho, when she was just five years old. With the encouragement of her parents, she cut her eponymous debut album at eight, and her childhood in Los Angeles was punctuated by world travel and performances before enormous crowds. By just about any measure, it was an extraordinary way to come of age as both a woman and a musician.

After graduating from high school, Nikka’s maturation as an artist truly began. She sought in earnest to discover her own voice and her own style, to find what made her authentically Nikka. As she told MTV.com in an interview in 2001: “I was really into Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, all the old Motown stuff and Stax. I would just sit around and rewind [the tapes] and try to sing the harmonies and learn each part. I would sit in front of my stereo for hours. I wanted to get that — whatever that was.” After a string of critically acclaimed and commercially successful LPs that began with her 2001 Virgin debut Everybody Got Their Something, Nikka, along with artists like Amy Winehouse and Joss Stone, became a bright star in the “nu-soul” firmament, renowned the world over for her unique style — a seductive alchemy that recombines the tropes of American soul and funk music into something wholly her own. In the years since her debut, she has toured with Lenny Kravitz, Coldplay, AC/DC, Beck and D’Angelo, has recorded with superstar DJ and producer Mark Ronson, was nominated for an MTV Music Award, and had multiple hit singles in Europe. Nikka also collaborated with Prince on several occasions: she wrote Silver Tongue with him, which became the B-side for his single Call Your Name, she performed with him at his Live At the Aladdin Las Vegas show (that was released on DVD), she was his special guest for one of his 21 Nights in London shows at the O² during the Summer of 2007 and opened for him at the Forum in LA in 2011. Known for the raw allure and energy of her kinetic live performances, Nikka’s voice and stage presence have been compared favorably to everyone from Janis Joplin to Chaka Khan to Sly Stone.

Last Fall, after a hiatus of six years, Nikka made her triumphant return with the release of her new album titled “Dirty Disco”, an electrifying fusion of funk and disco produced by her longtime collaborator Justin Stanley (Eric Clapton, Prince, Jamie Lidell).