WKYC: Cleveland Drag Artist Onya Nurve Joins S17 fast of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”

Nurve has made a name for herself in Northeast Ohio’s drag scene for the past several years. She was named Cleveland’s best drag performer in the Cleveland Scene’s 2023 Best of Cleveland issue and won the title of Mx. Zephyr in the first Zephyr Drag Takeover competition in Kent a year prior. Currently, Nurve is the inaugural ArtReach fellow for Haus of Transcendent, a Cleveland-based LGBTQ nonprofit.

Nurve and her work has been featured in articles by the Scene, the Buckeye Flame and 3News media partner cleveland.com.

In her “Meet the Queens” feature on the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” YouTube channel, Onya described herself as the “Andy Warhol of the drag scene.” She considers her drag to be “a balance of drama, theatre, art, sprinkled on top a lot of Blackness and glamour.”

“The drag scene in Cleveland, I would consider it pretty competitive,” she told MTV. “You’ve got your pageant queens, your alternative entertainers, you have your kings, and you have a lot of newer entertainers. There’s a lot of influence in the college scene, of the students doing drag. Burlesque is super popular. There are only a handful of Black entertainers in Cleveland so I think I stood out in that way…”