Lexa Gates

Born on April 8, 2001, in New York, Ivanna Alexandra Martinez, who performs under the name Lexa Gates, grew up between Puerto Rico — where she lived as a child with her father and sister — and the Queens neighborhood after her mother returned to New York. Coming from an environment in which her mother wrote songs and sang in cafés as an amateur, Lexa Gates became familiar with the piano early by watching her play and took singing lessons during childhood. She left the New York public school system at 15, while she was in 10th grade, and began producing her own music at 17. Her practice is situated within contemporary American hip‑hop and rap, as a musician and rapper. Her discography is organized around regularly released albums: Order of Events (2020), Delirium and Hungry (2021), Universe Wrapped in Flesh (2022), followed by Elite Vessel (2024) and I Am (2026). Lexa Gates accompanies some of these projects with performative devices, such as being confined for ten hours in a glass box on Union Square in Manhattan for the release of Elite Vessel, or an immersive installation at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York centered on a human hamster wheel for I Am. She also states that she has been sober from alcohol since age 21.