Sellah was born Whitney-Michael McCloud on September 6 in San Bernardino, California, to parents Whitney Patrick and Teresa McCloud. He hails from an ethnically diverse background, boasting African American, Native American, Scottish, and West Indian ancestry. His father works for the U.S. government and his mother is an educator and philanthropist. He has two older sisters. He spent most of his early life accompanying his government family on trips all over the world. By the time Sellah turned 18, he had lived in over 30 places, in dozens of countries. The experience of interacting with such a rich variety of cultures inspired an enduring interest in ethnology.

Sellah has been interested in entertainment since he was a boy but was often urged toward more conventional avenues. For a time, basketball served as a means of reconciling his dreams of stardom with the practicalities of making a living. He excelled at the sport, competing at the professional level internationally throughout his high school years. Sellah spent grades 9 through 11 playing for a professional league in Germany with the intention of playing at the collegiate level. Although recruiters jockeyed to land him, he was prevented from accepting any offers when his family moved to Toronto, Canada, his senior year, a turn of events that led him to begin questioning his interest in the sport. Nonetheless, he decided to attend Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, where he periodically trained with the Division 1 men’s team. After a year there, he sent out a demo reel and transferred to Brigham Young University–Hawaii on a partial basketball scholarship. There, he played NCAA basketball for a year. However, he found himself depleted by the energy he was expending on an activity he no longer wished to pursue professionally.

Having cultivated a talent for taking striking images, Sellah subsequently withdrew from college and moved to Los Angeles, California, to pursue modeling and photography. After posing and shooting for several top agencies and publications, he earned a reputation for professionalism and commitment, leading to opportunities in Africa, Europe, and Asia. He became the first black male model to work in Shanghai, China. With aspirations of broadening his skill set, Sellah then relocated to New York to study acting before settling in South Africa. Sellah began to see the fruits of his labour, steadily booking acting and modeling jobs while living there. His successes led to the pivotal decision to pursue his true dream of becoming a solo music artist. In 2012, Sellah fully committed to that pursuit. He is constantly motivated by both his triumphs and failures in the entertainment industry. Those experiences have shaped him into the confident, assertive, ambitious, and zealous individual that he is today. Sellah has since established himself as a genre-bending solo artist exploring the sounds of electro, hip hop, techno and R&B.