Janani K. Jha (fka J. Maya) is a singer-songwriter, performer, and author hailing from California’s Bay Area. After graduating with academic honors from Harvard College and earning acceptance to Harvard Law School at the age of twenty, she decided to defer her legal ambitions to pursue her lifelong pipe dream: music. Today, with millions of followers and listeners across platforms, Janani (pronounced jenna-knee) has transformed this dream into reality.

Janani’s music career was launched when a demo of her Greek-mythology-inspired pop song, “Achilles Heel,” found a viral audience on TikTok. Praise for the track inspired her to release it as her debut single in 2021, and to keep writing mythology- and literature-infused music to share with her growing audience. In 2022, another of Janani’s original songs, “Sunday Crossword,” went viral when she connected its lyrical wordplay to her history as an MVP on the competitive punning circuit. Her videos about the song have been viewed over 14 million times across platforms. Janani followed up with her debut EP, Poetic License, featuring several other fan favorites from that year (“Library Card,” “Two Roads”), and played her first ever headline show to a sold-out crowd in Los Angeles.

Janani released her debut album, The Rest of the Laurels, in December 2024, a concept album inspired by the mythological and literary canons that are dear to her and her audience. To date, songs from Laurels have been streamed over thirty million times. The album, released independently, charted on the global iTunes pop charts. Janani performed to a crowd of hundreds at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right for the sold-out album release show in January 2025, also her first East Coast headline.

The Rest of the Laurels is accompanied by a digital companion novella, Katathon, written and self-published by Janani. The novella tells the story of a not-so-distant future when an entrance to Hell itself is discovered on Earth. In this world, the circles of Hell described in Dante's Inferno are real, and they serve as the backdrop for a televised competition called Katathon in which daring contestants race to traverse all nine levels. Each chapter of the novella corresponds to a track from Laurels.

Janani also plays the role of Aphrodite in EPIC: The Musical, a musical retelling of Homer’s Odyssey written by Jorge Rivera-Herrans. EPIC has attracted a cult following online, and the cast album on which Janani featured amassed over 20 million streams in its first week, charting at #1 on iTunes, #1 on Billboard Soundtracks, #9 on Spotify’s Top Songs: Debut Global, and #75 on the Billboard 200.

Janani has been praised for her “whip-smart” songwriting and named one of the freshest voices in music by institutions such as VOGUE, Forbes, NME, SPIN, and the Recording Academy. With big plans for her future across live music, theater, film & TV, and writing, Janani K. Jha is just getting started.