Dara Artistfacts

September 9, 1998
Dara was born Darina Nikolaeva Yotova on September 9, 1998, in Varna - a Black Sea port city and Bulgaria's third largest. "I grew up with music the way some children grow up with sport," she told The Independent. "Obsessively, constantly, like there was no other option."
She attended the Dobri Hristov National School of Arts in Varna, where she specialized in folklore singing, a training that would later shape the distinctive Bulgarian folk influences threaded through her pop music.
In 2015, Yotova entered the Bulgarian edition of The X Factor, finishing third in the competition. The exposure proved to be her launchpad - she signed with Bulgarian label Virginia Records shortly after and adopted the stage name Dara. It was a deliberate reinvention, marking the beginning of a career built on her own terms rather than a competition result.
Her debut single, "K'vo ne chu," released in the summer of 2016, spent five weeks at the top of the Bulgarian charts. Dara has since established herself as one of Bulgaria's biggest pop stars, scoring multiple #1 hits on the local charts. She releases music in either Bulgarian or English, "in whatever language a feeling demands."
Dara became a coach on The Voice of Bulgaria in 2021. The following year, Jacklyn Tarrakci, a member of Team Dara, won the competition.
Dara was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. Rather than hiding it, she turned it into the concept for her second studio album, titled Adhdara, a portmanteau of her condition and her name. "This syndrome and all these things I'm trying to fight against are part of me," she told Bulgarian television station bTV.
In 2026 Dara was selected to represent Bulgaria at the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. Her entry "Bangaranga" drew on the ancient Bulgarian kukeri ritual - a midwinter tradition in which men dress in towering fur costumes with animal masks and bells, making thunderous noise to drive away evil spirits. The imagery fed directly into her Eurovision stage show, in which her dancers wore masks representing inner demons. The song gave Bulgaria its first-ever victory at the competition.
Dara married Dr. Ervin Ivanov, a pharmacologist, in 2025. The couple tied the knot during a trip to Thailand, and Dara announced the wedding in her signature style: via a short social media video in which she appeared in a white wedding dress surrounded by six bridesmaids and declaring, "I just got married."

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