DJ Cuppy ’11 is remixing music, education and impact

Florence “Cuppy” Otedola ’11 is a world-renowned DJ, philanthropist and trailblazer—whether opening the UN General Assembly (the first Nigerian ever to do so!), serving as the first international ambassador for the King’s Trust, or empowering young scholars through her foundation. When she returned to ASL in January, we caught up with her to reminisce about her middle school days on Waverley Place and the global journey that followed.

Cuppy arrives at One Waverley Place on an unusually sunny January day, radiating warmth and brightness from the moment she steps foot in the School. She marvels as she takes in her new—yet familiar—surroundings.

“Already, just seeing all the orange,” Cuppy beams, gesturing around the School, accented generously in its signature tone. “It’s always been the orange. It’s so energetic and empowering and communal. Just being back here reminds me of what it was like as someone in Grade 5, coming to a new country.” Turning with the hallway from reception toward the Middle School, she spots Yoruba dotted on the wall of languages spoken at ASL, and excitedly poses for a photo. “My language!” Cuppy exclaims.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Cuppy attended the American International School of Lagos before moving to London in the early 2000s. Seeing her Grade 5 class photo in the 2003–04 middle school yearbook, she laughs with delight. She stands in the middle row of Steve Wasley’s Grade 5 class in a graphic tee featuring the dead-on stare of a glamorous cartoon cat, “Purr-fect” spelled out beneath.

She picks out faces and names she remembers fondly from that class. “For a year, we were all best friends,” Cuppy says. She recounts her memories of taking the school bus from her Hampstead home down to St. John’s Wood every day; how she loved connecting with kids from other grades by sharing music with them on the bus to ASL—an early sign, perhaps, of a career she’d go on to make for herself as a world-renowned DJ. She would share music on her way to school, and while at school, she was free to explore her creative side, joining the choir and performing in musical theater. “I was inspired from day zero,” Cuppy says.

“A lot of my who is because of my why,” Cuppy explains. “Since I turned 30, I’ve started to realize that to grow and self-develop, you have to understand your story. So I've been learning about my rich heritage in Africa, but also asking questions like, Why do I love education? Since ASL, I’ve been to nothing short of five different schools and four different universities. I wanted to understand where my love for education comes from—and ASL is part of that journey.”

She speaks with a palpable sense of gratitude about the opportunities she was given throughout her childhood to pursue her passions. “As a Nigerian woman, coming from a continent and country where women are not always given the opportunity to learn, I was given this chance to follow my dreams through education.” 

While Cuppy has been DJing since her high school days, she’s also found time to earn a bachelor’s degree in economics from King’s College London, a master’s in music business from New York University, and a master’s in African studies from Oxford—and she’s now considering a PhD, Cuppy reveals, a twinkle in her eye. (“Exclusive!,” she says of the information, with a laugh.)

In between master’s degrees and DJ sets, in 2018, Cuppy launched the Cuppy Foundation, a philanthropic project aimed at empowering young people worldwide. What started as a way to help Nigerian children access education has grown rather quickly into a global movement.

Since its inception, the foundation has expanded into multiple sectors and continents and has developed partnerships with well-established organizations. By way of example, Cuppy talks about her foundation’s work with Save the Children, a UK-based international humanitarian charity that carries out youth-focused work around the world. 

Now in its sixth year partnering with Save the Children, the Cuppy Foundation supports a stabilization center in the northern Nigerian state of Borno. “Going there, one of my big things was providing learning materials. But you can’t educate a sick child—so that needs to be solved first,” says Cuppy. “I’m hoping that more and more of our humanitarian work can go into development,” which, as Cuppy says, helps to “break the cycle” that keeps children from receiving education. “A lot of them suffer from pneumonia or malnutrition. So primary healthcare is the priority there.”

“That’s more of the work we do back home in Nigeria,” Cuppy says. But here in London—which she has also considered home for two decades and counting—she and her foundation approach the same goal of allowing people to receive as much education as they would like from a different angle, and at a very different stage in students’ careers.

“I think there’s nothing worse than having the door open and you’re in there—but you cannot stay in there. That’s really painful,” she says, explaining what motivated her to start the Cuppy Africa Scholars Fund, a scholarship providing critical grants to graduate students at Oxford (and now, NYU, and soon, King’s College!), across disciplines, who are African or of African descent and who find their ability to continue their studies impacted by unexpected financial burdens.

“A lot of the success stories we hear are just people who got the chance, and there are so many people who just don’t,” Cuppy emphasizes. The week after her ASL visit, she plans to return to Oxford, where she graduated in 2022, to connect with some of the scholars she is currently helping to support. So far, her namesake scholarship fund has seen one class of eight graduate students through their respective programs, with another class graduating this summer. Some are scientists; one studies geography; another Africa’s art history. “I’m so excited to meet over coffee and understand what they’re trying to achieve,” Cuppy says of the scholars she will meet soon when she returns to another of her alma maters to pay a visit.

In September, Cuppy became the first Nigerian ever to open the UN General Assembly (UNGA) when she delivered a speech on the importance of youth action on day one of the 2024 Summit of the Future. “It was, by far, the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” Cuppy recalls. And she didn’t have a teleprompter as a crutch. “I made sure I was present. I took my time. When I say I owned the stage, it's not in an egoistic way, but in that I enjoyed every moment—I loved it.”

Asked about how she dealt with the enormous stress of addressing hundreds of people on what is quite literally the world stage, Cuppy credits her DJing career and education alike for giving her the confidence to do it from the heart. “DJing is expressive, and it's made me emotive as a person; I'm able to connect with people. I'm also very much able to perform under pressure,” she muses.

Cuppy also DJed at the opening of the Summit of the Future, though it wasn’t her first time taking to her DJ decks in a diplomatic context. It was her “third or fourth” time doing so at the UN alone—so while the UNGA opening speech felt like a big deal, the DJing was pure fun. “The not-so-exciting part is that you do have to pre-select certain songs, and there's a big process that goes behind it,” Cuppy admits. “When I say I'm DJing at the United Nations, it is most certainly not jumping on the tables. But it's amazing.”

She recounts a particularly memorable DJing moment when Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed of Nigeria broke protocol by getting onstage alongside Cuppy, and breaking out into dance. “Her Excellency decided to come and boogie-woogie, which was exciting… and the young people loved it. We’re all humans, at the end of the day.”

With the Cuppy Foundation, she focuses primarily on the UN’s fourth and fifth sustainable development goals, education and gender equality, but the Summit of the Future in September allowed Cuppy to devote a full week to discussing and addressing all manner of youth issues with world leaders, from AI, to the environment, to her utmost philanthropic priority of access to education—especially for girls.

“After leaving ASL, I went to a boarding school in the British system, and it was very different,” Cuppy remembers. Increasingly homesick, music turned from a way of connecting with others on the school bus, to a mode of escape. “I had fewer friends; less of a group and a community… I just fell in love with the power that DJs had.” Cuppy’s iPod, still a novelty in the early aughts was filled with Nigerian music. “I would go on a journey, and escape,” she says. 

In only a few years, having become known for her iPod’s music library, Cuppy was “doing everyone’s 16th birthday—horribly wrong.” By the time everybody’s 18th rolled around, she had some actual DJ decks; a gift from her parents for her own 18th birthday. Around the same time, Cuppy was beginning to fall in love with nightlife. From there, her hobby morphed into a career. She made a name and a fanbase for herself as “DJ Cuppy.”

“Cuppy,” because of cupcakes. She’s always loved baking them—and eating them—and digresses briefly to reminisce about the cupcakes she would sometimes buy on St. John’s Wood High Street after classes at ASL. 

“Everyone was calling me ‘Cupcake,’ and then that turned into ‘Cuppy,’” she says. “I have been Cuppy for such a long time that when aspects of me change, I think it's hard for people to see—for example, just me not having pink hair. Or when I decided that I was going to school, my fans said, ‘But you owe us an album. Why are you going back to school?’” 

“The world can try, very often, to put you in a box,” Cuppy remarks. “But actually, there is no ‘Cuppy’ or ‘Florence’ box: they coexist. “I am an artist, and I am also a philanthropist… I am so grateful for the opportunity I’ve been presented to synergize philanthropy, music and education. I am really proud of being someone who creates their own story.”

Cuppy—Florence—thinks back to another interview she did not long ago, in which she was called a changemaker. “Someone called me that, and I’m going to stand by it.” At the time, she wondered what exactly it meant. “But I think this is what it is: creating your own rules.”