Aliya Janell Bio

After completing school, 19-year-old Aliya Janell worked as a waiter at Octopus Japanese restaurant in Burbank to finance dance tuition at Millenium Dance Complex. In 2013, she booked her first job with singer K. Michelle at the BET Awards. That year, she started posting short cover dance videos on Instagram and also joined YouTube. She continued to dance for popular singers and appear in commercials, while regularly sharing her dance steps online.

In 2017, an Instagram clip of her dancing to the song Itty Bitty Piggy by Nicki Minaj was spotted by the rapper herself, who offered her to choreograph for her. She worked with Minaj on her songs Barbie Tings, Chun Li, and Ganja Burn in 2017, and also choreographed her performances for Saturday Night Live, the BET Awards, and the VMAs in 2018. Aliya particularly cherished her experience of working with Minaj one-on-one on the two-minute-long teaser of “Chun Li”, which was released in April 2018 and gave her the opportunity to showcase her talent.

After working as a dance assistant in Los Angeles for two years, Aliya Janell used her viral fame following her collaboration with Minaj to launch her own choreography career. She started to offer dance classes, which were extremely popular thanks to her viral videos on social media. As demand grew from across the country, she started a travelling series called Queens N’ Lettos, which consisted of her unapologetically raunchy choreography in five-inch long heels, even though heels were not a requirement. The heels dance brand, which she claims was created to show how one can prioritize self-love through dance, became a hit internationally and morphed Queens N’ Lettos into a lifestyle brand. The brand has now expanded to include an apparel line, as well as the “QNL University”, available exclusively through Patreon. Even though she has sometimes been criticized for being overtly sexual, she defended celebrating self-love through sexy moves, going so far as to say, “If you're talking negatively about this dance style and sexy routines, chances are it's because you're scared to do it.” While she has established herself as a hip-hop expert, she acknowledged to Popsugar in February 2020 that an audition for Jennifer Lopez a few years ago had exposed her deficiency in different dance styles and trends, particularly the Latino style.

Aliya Janell was born on October 16, 1994 in Los Angeles, California, United States. She revealed through an Instagram post that she is “50/50 BLACK and Filipino”. Her father, Kevin Young, is Black, while her mother was bor   n and raised in Villasis, Pangasinan. Her parents divorced when she was four and she was raised by her single mother. As a child, she was a fan of the Philippine noontime variety show Wowowee. She also loves Filipino food and often grabs dishes like Sinigang, Adobo, and Sisig from a Filipino restaurant called DJ Bibingkahan in California. She attended Burbank High School where she sang and danced in show choir for four years, and while she did not know how to read music, she was the star dancer. She was also the dance captain in her senior year.

Aliya Janell first met Tallie Brinson, a fellow dancer who later participated in the third season of America's Best Dane Crew, while working as a dancer on her first commercial for Samsung. They met a few more times at auditions and eventually worked together for Keyshia Cole. They felt a spark while performing at Tampa, Florida, but stopped talking to each other as they were both in other relationships. Nevertheless, her relationship ended when her then-boyfriend found out texts between her and Tallie. Tallie, also single, called her weeks later, but she was initially reluctant to date him as he was 10 years older than her. However, when she brought up lack of experience, he swept her over by confidently telling her that she did not need ten different men to be experienced. He proposed to her in October 2018 and they got married in late 2021, after much delay due to Covid-19.