Odisha’s Sriya Lenka becomes India’s first Indian K-pop idol

Sriya Lenka (also known as Shreya Lenka or henceforth ‘Sriya’) from Odisha has been selected as the 5th member of the K-pop girl group, BLACKSWAN. In a global audition that was conducted by BLACKSWAN’s agency DRmusic Entertainment in 2021 to find a new member to join the group, four finalists were chosen out of over 4000 people who auditioned.

Only Sriya Lenka and Gabriela Strassburger Dalcin (henceforth ‘Gabi’) from Brazil were the only two chosen and were flown out to South Korea to start their training period. Out of these two trainees, only one was to be chosen as the 5th member, to join BLACKSWAN’s Youngheun, Fatou, Judy, and Leia.

On May 26 however, DR Music finally revealed that both Sriya and Gabi will be joining BLACKSWAN as the girl group’s newest members! With this, Sriya becomes the first Indian K-pop idol.

DRmusic Entertainment announced the same, sharing, “Sriya and Gabi were finally selected as members of blackswan after participating the global audition program for last 6 months. With their debut, we will be back with the new blackswan.”

DRmusic Entertainment also revealed that this addition is part of a project called ‘Cygnus’.

The agency shared, “‘Cygnus', which means constellation of swan, is a project to discover and to train trainees to become stars like the Cygnus. Sriya and Gabi are the first generation of Cygnus, which will be introduced soon. Thank you for your interest and support.” Further, DRmusic Entertainment’s global audition project ‘Cygnus’ is set to continue in the future as well.

BLACKSWAN first debuted in 2011 as RANIA, with eight members. The group reformed to BP RANIA in 2016, following member changes. In 2020, the group rebranded to BLACKSWAN following more changes in the line-up.

As of present, BLACKSWAN consists of six members: Youngheun, Fatou, Judy, Leia, Sriya, and Gabi.