Ask most people to picture a cat person or a dog person, and they’ll pick a lane. The electronic producer and DJ Tokimonsta, born Jennifer Lee, refuses to. She’s both, fully and enthusiastically, and living with one of each has left her with a theory: cats don’t have a temperament problem, they have a public-relations problem.
A trailblazer in the producer-DJ world, the Grammy-nominated Korean American artist, who paints too, has collaborated with the likes of Anderson .Paak and Sia and played the biggest stages there are. But the collaborators she talks about most warmly are the two who share her house.
A cat with better publicity than his reputation
Her cat, Misha, a Scottish Fold, is the centerpiece of her feline-image campaign. Named after a promoter she once met in St. Petersburg who gave her a stuffed cat, Misha is affectionate and social in a way that scrambles people’s expectations, the kind of cat who climbs into a lap and burrows his head into your hand. Visitors, Lee has noted, tend to leave saying he’s made them want a cat of their own. That reaction is exactly what convinced her that cats’ aloof reputation gets ahead of the actual animals, a bit of bad PR that precedes them into the room.
Misha is also, by her account, a menace in the studio, the type to wander in, stroll across a piano, and start knocking things over. Rather than shoo him out, she made him a muse. Lee has said she wrote a song built around him, cheekily titled “Furrever,” that uses his purring as a foley texture. When she plays anything bass-heavy, she’s described his eyes going wide and his ears shooting up, an expression she likens to a stoic pigeon.
The rescue dog who keeps her honest
Then there’s Mandu, whose name means “dumpling” in Korean, a rescue mix of Australian Shepherd, Chihuahua, and Pug. Lee describes him as wildly sociable, a little scattered, and the smartest, most trainable dog she’s had, also needy and athletic enough that keeping up with him has, in her telling, dragged a self-described lazy person into being more active. She’s talked openly about the pet-parent guilt that comes with the job: if Mandu shoots her a bored look, she feels obligated to get him out the door. For someone unsure about having kids, she’s said, it’s a satisfying way to express a nurturing streak.
Her love of animals goes back to childhood, though not always happily. She’s recalled a pair of pet-shop rabbits, a brown one that turned out to be a dwarf and a white one that ballooned into a ten-pound albino with red eyes, that simply vanished one day, quietly rehomed by parents who saw pets differently than she does. There was also a family Jindo, a Korean breed, from around fourth grade until college, an atypically social one who liked to scale the backyard fence and get let back in by the mailman.
Life on the road, minus one cat
Touring complicates pet parenthood. Lee has brought Mandu along, to Coachella among other places, but a much earlier attempt to travel with Misha became a cautionary tale: at a rented house, the cat disappeared, sparking a search party of ten people before he turned up wedged far under a bed in the dark. The verdict was swift, no more cat on tour. These days a trusted sitter with kids who adore Misha handles home duty, and Lee keeps tabs the modern way, over FaceTime and a set of Nest cameras. The cat, she’s said, is unbothered by the video calls, the dog gets visibly confused about where she’s gone, and one experiment talking to Mandu through a camera rattled him enough that she decided to leave the tech alone.
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Lee’s connection to her animals has taken on a deeper resonance in the years since. Her album Eternal Reverie, released in 2025, is her fifth full-length and her first in five years, and it became a tribute to her best friend and tour manager, Regina Biondo, who died of cancer in October 2024. It’s not the first time Lee has made art out of hardship: she was diagnosed with the rare vascular brain condition Moyamoya disease in 2015 and, after two brain surgeries, briefly lost her ability to understand and produce language before recovering and returning to music.
Set against that, her affection for a couple of grounding, ordinary, faintly ridiculous animals reads as more than a fun fact about a musician. The through-line of her cat’s “PR problem” turns out to be a familiar one for anyone who’s loved a misunderstood creature, or weathered a misunderstood chapter of their own life: the reputation rarely tells you the whole story. Sometimes the overlooked one just needs someone willing to sit still long enough to notice.
