DJ Tezrah is coming is coming off of non-stop month. “I originally had shows scheduled five days a week in March,” she says. But being busy is nothing new for the Fairfax, Va., native; I’ve stumbled upon her sets four times in the past year–she’s everywhere. The fifth time I saw Tezrah was at a coffee shop, where we sat down to untangle how a pre-med undergrad with a summer at Harvard School of Design under her belt nearly joined the local women’s professional soccer team on her way to becoming a fixture of D.C.’s music scene.
Diana Weigel’s original stage name was DJ DeeDub—an homage to her initials—before she found out that name had been trademarked in California by a “white dude rapper.” Weigel made up “Tezrah.” “It sounded phonetically nice to me and it’s androgynous,” she says of her current alias.
But way before DeeDub or Tezrah, a young Weigel made herself a mixtape with a boombox at her after school program. “I was always listening to the radio at the daycare,” says Weigel, now 29. “I would press record on the boombox for my favorite songs and press stop before the commercials started. When another song I liked came on, I’d record that. So pretty soon I had a cassette of all my favorite songs back to back, which I put on repeat.”
A decade or so later, Weigel was creating warm up mixes for the women’s soccer team at the College of William & Mary, where she played left fullback on an athletics scholarship all four years, and managed to fit in a summer at the Harvard School of Design, to boot. Pretty soon she was DJing house parties. “I was able to cut and edit and put backbeats under songs, but it wasn’t live like I do now, it was pre-recorded,” she says of those early days.
Eventually Weigel landed her first real gig: an optional party for a visiting group of Model UN high schoolers visiting campus. “It was an optional dance,” she stresses, “for high schoolers.” Two students showed up, but Weigel’s friends came and made it a party. She remembers playing old school David Guetta and Kesha’s “Tik Tok.”
Weigel’s childhood dream was to play professional soccer, and got her shot when the National Women’s Soccer League launched the year after she graduated with a degree in neuroscience (and following a brief stint at Catholic University’s graduate architecture program). She tried out for the local professional team, the Washington Spirit, and was one of the very last people to get cut during tryouts.
“They said, ‘We’ll sub you in if you play on the reserve team and you’ll probably get picked up next year,’ and I was thinking about this whole timeline … ‘Ten years later, where will I be?’” she remembers considering. “I could get injured, the longevity for being a soccer player is short. What will I do when I retire at 34-35—if I make it that long? All those factors, and the money is basically pennies.” She didn’t end up taking the spot on the reserve team.
Instead, she worked as a sound technician at Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE and DJ’d for friends as a hobby. Her weekends were spent at classic, now-defunct D.C. gay bars like Phase 1, Town, and Apex, where she saw her first professional female DJ. “I saw DJ Rosie and remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a woman. I’d love to do that, that would be cool,” she says.
One day a friend who worked for Live Nation called to ask if Weigel would DJ an after party for an Imagine Dragons show in D.C. “This show was really simple transitions from one song to another, so I remember thinking it wasn’t a great set, but my friend was very encouraging,” she recalls. During that gig Weigel got a text from another friend inviting her out to a party. “I told them I couldn’t make it ‘cause I was DJing [the Imagine Dragons party],” she says. “They were like, ‘oh I didn’t know you did that, come DJ this fundraiser.”
The fundraiser would turn into glittHER, the massively successful montly party for LGBTQ femmes that ran from 2013 to 2016. “We packed out Zeba Bar every month. During Pride, or when the Supreme Court ruling came out for marriage equality, the line was around the block,” Weigel recalls. Her mixes around this time featured artists like Kesha, Icona Pop, and Miley Cyrus. “glittHER made me realize [DJing] could be big. Things kind of snowballed from there.”
When one of the founders of glittHER moved, ending the popular party’s run, a few regulars decided to put on a monthly spinoff party they called WhiskHer. In collaboration with local drag kings, WhiskHer hosted parties at Bloomingdale’s Old Engine 12 through 2017. This was the beginning of Tezrah Productions, the company through which Weigel hosts her own LGBTQ-focused dance parties around D.C.
Since then, Weigel has headlined venues and parties big and small around town, including Bent, the 9:30 Club’s new LGBTQ dance night, the weekly drag brunch at Don Tito in Arlington, Eighteenth Street Lounge, and A League of Her Own and XX+, two bars for queer women that opened last summer. She’s also been voted best DJ by Washington Blade readers for the past two years.
Tezrah’s mixes blend pop songs with 80’s and 90’s classics over beats that enhance rather than obscure what makes the carefully chosen songs so beloved. You can sing along, and the beat is consistent and strong enough that even the most rhythmically challenged can dance. “I have a pop ear, but I won’t listen to the radio for a few months, and I’ll do a deep dive into more obscure music to bring out those sounds into a mix so that my audience doesn’t get tired of pop songs,” she says.
But the Tezrah sound isn’t just that of other artists. “Production is a different skill set than DJing. For DJing, I can create some remixes and build that into my playlist. Then you have someone like Calvin Harris who is more like a producer,” Weigel says. “I want to go towards Calvin Harris.”
An album of her own music is in the works, which Weigel hopes to complete within this year before her 30th birthday. Is a birthday party-slash-listening party in the works? “That’s a terrible idea,” she says with a laugh. “Like ‘It’s my birthday, listen to my album! It’s dope!’”
She plans to tour following the album release, but knows she’ll return to D.C. “I have a foundation here, my parents, friends, I’ve built up a fan base, a network, I can always find work here. The LGBTQ community here is tight, small, and supportive. And D.C. in general, the people are transient, as are the places, and that means that there’s always something new popping up.”
Next up, Weigel’s drag king alter ego, Daddy J Tezrah, will be performing at Pretty Boi Drag’s Open King Night on Thursday, April 11. Tezrah has been playing Pretty Boi Drag’s shows for almost three years, but Daddy J has only appeared once before, bringing down the house with Maroon 5’s “One More Time.” Weigel won’t say what Daddy J’s next performance song will be—if you want to know, you’ve got to go.
Find Tezrah’s events here.
This story has been updated with the correct spelling for glittHER.
