ALPHA
MAGAZINE
It's All Coming Together for Kristina Menissov
written by
CLINT PORTE
Kristina Menissov learned early that a woman can carry more than one destiny at a time, despite the world telling them otherwise.
“Music was my first love,” she says, without hesitation. “Modeling pays my bills. But singing feeds my soul.”
It’s a through-line that runs through her life, splitting necessity from desire, survival from calling. She remembers singing her first operatic scale as a child in Almaty, Kazakhstan, standing hoarse-throated at five years old, trying to achieve perfect pitch.
She remembers the conservatory halls in Kazakhstan, her native country, sustaining the disciplined intensity of classical training, the later immersion in Rome, where opera wasn’t a fantasy. In those rooms, Kristina felt she belonged.
Menissov believes herself to be an ALPHA female, but not in the casual, clichéd sense. “It’s harder for women,” she says. “We have to slay, lead, look beautiful, be emotional but not too emotional, and hold it all together.”
Her definition is less about dominance and more about endurance—the ability to be strong and soft at the same time, to occupy multiple roles without collapsing under the weight of them.
Kristina’s sentiment underlines a struggle that many women in the spotlight will have to deal with - the pressure to prove that they are there for more than just aesthetics.
For years, battling this narrative was key for Kristina, who viewed it dismissal of everything she had worked to build. In actuality, modeling, in the beginning, was an identity conflict of sorts for her—a reminder that the world saw her exterior before it heard her interior.
“At the very beginning of my journey, my relationship with modeling started with negatives,” she admits. “I just wanted to prove to everybody that I’m more than a pretty face.”
After deciding to fight this battle full-on, she wanted to take her career to the next level, planning a move to the U.S. and the hills of Hollywood to bring her dreams to fruition.
Life, however, doesn’t always unfold cleanly. She arrived in the United States in 2017, pregnant, navigating immigration, motherhood, and the brutal economics of starting over. “I needed to pay my bills,” she says. “And eventually something that so many people kept telling me I should try to do—I listened. And I went and conquered.”
Conquering didn’t look cinematic at first. It looked like smaller e-commerce shoots modeling smaller products. Then came the commercial castings. Next, fashion weeks in Los Angeles and Miami. A slow accumulation of credibility in an industry that often treats beauty as currency and individuality as a risk. She describes feeling too ambiguous to fit neat categories—“not Black enough and not Asian enough”—yet, those same tensions became the texture that would soon set her apart.
By the time major fashion houses began calling—Cartier, Balmain, Chopard, Yves Saint Laurent—Menissov had already built a resilience that couldn’t be airbrushed. Vogue Mexico, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle Arabia, Glamour Bulgaria followed. The images were glossy, extravagant, composed, but the reality, she says, was more granular.
“We’re just the same people. We hustle, we juggle, we have so many roles we want to accomplish,” she says. “I’m a mother, a musician, and an entrepreneur. Being a musician nowadays, you have to run it like a business.”
It’s not-so-surprising when she lists the things she does herself; editing visuals, designing sets, managing technical details she never expected to master. “I cannot let go of control,” she says. “I want to do it all.” Minutes before sitting down for interviews, she might be sprinting to a car, changing outfits, troubleshooting logistics. Then she steps into the frame, into the persona, into the illusion. The glamour is real, but so is the sprint to get there.
Despite her ascension in fashion and modeling, music remained a constant goal for her to attain. Somewhere between 2016—the year she started writing her own music outside of the opera format—and 2020—the year she released her first single—her long-time desire of becoming a pop star and releasing music on the international stage became her primary focus in the midst of her breakout modeling career.
Inspired by the likes of Alicia Keys, Whitney Houston, Sade, and more recently, the hits of Tyla and Chloe Bailey, Kristina would release her first single, “Taking Over LA,” in 2020, following up with, “Breakout,” a progressive house anthem produced in collaboration with the Italian-born producer, DJ Marzia Dorlando. From there it was a steady process of new releases, each one building on the success of the last, until her momentum caught the attention of several decision makers in the music business.
Her popular single, ‘Geisha,’ is lush and still within the house music style that is known for. Beneath the color and choreography is a thesis. Inspired by Memoirs of a Geisha, Menissov wanted to challenge Western misreadings of the figure. “Geisha is an artist. She does it all. She’s beautiful. And I think there are misconceptions about who Geisha is,” she says. For her, the concept becomes metaphor: yin and yang, power and softness, dominance and surrender coexisting. “We can be alpha females and go-getters, but we also have to find that softness within,” she says. “That balance—that’s power.”
Since ‘Geisha’ released and topped the iTunes Charts at #116, Menissov has since followed with singles, ‘Her Story’ and ‘Anyway You Want,’ the former made with the purpose of highlighting issues with police brutality, and the latter a celebration of connection and romance.
Both records continue her frequent artistic collaboration with songwriter and producer, Andrew Lane and Miguel Palmero of Drew Right Music Inc. The releases continue her joint venture with Universal Music Group, Virgin Music and Alpha Music Group. The records showcase Menissov versatility and range of styles in performance.
Off camera, balance is harder to manage. Her philosophy is choosing presence over performance. “We have so much on our hands that we're sitting there in front of our kid and we're actually zoning out…Sometimes an absent parent is less toxic than a present-absent parent,” she says, carefully.
When she’s depleted, she tells her son she needs thirty minutes of quiet—to reset, to return. It’s a small ritual, but one that feels radical in an industry that equates visibility with worth. Still, there is more music coming, more collaborations, more carefully constructed visuals.
Every decision filters through one question: what would my son think? “So each of my decisions that I do, and if I want to create something new, I always think, well, will he be proud?” It’s a quiet metric in an industry obsessed with metrics that are anything but.
“I think that's what I'm looking forward to, because the more I'm working on myself and gaining more trust with you and gaining more trust with myself, actually, that affects my motherhood, because I want my son to grow up and look at his mom and be like, well, she is doing good.”
Kristina stands on her success, not because she chose modeling over music or vice versa, but because she refused to surrender either dream to practicality or prejudice. Her voice carries through
the opera halls, runway lights, late-night edits, motherhood and ambition in equal measure.
Kristina is not an argument for one path or another. She is proof that one’s talent can truly emerge with the right amount of perseverance and patience.
credits
talent
Kristina Menissov - @kristinamenissov
photographer
Clint Porte - @paper.clint
cinematographer
Clint Porte - @paper.clint
interviewer
Clint Porte - @paper.clint
key hair
Ismail Beksoz - @ismail_beksoz
key mua
Anna Kopachinskaya - @anna.kopachinskaya
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