Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who believes in love, justice, and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research, and community arts facilitation.

Kama firmly believes that artistic and cultural practices have the power to build resilience, heal, and act as forms of resistance to the status quo. With a deep engagement in ocean narratives, island sovereignty, transgender poetics, and queer/trans spiritual histories, their body of work challenges colonial notions of time and space in relation to history, power, language, the body, and subject formation.

A theatre practitioner since the age of 15, Kama immigrated to India at 18 and completed a BA in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pune. During this time, they trained in contemporary dance and Kathak under the mentorship of Pt. Nandkishore Kapote. In 2008, Kama moved to Canada, where they completed an MA in Theory, Culture, and Politics at Trent University while continuing their training in physical theatre with Theatre Korzenie.

In 2012, Kama moved to Tio’tia:ke (Montréal), where they developed a multi-disciplinary and community-based arts practice. Creator and host of GENDER B(L)ENDER: queer open stage (2013-18), a cornerstone of the Montréal queer performance scene, they presented over 650 performances by more than 300 artists and collectives. They also curated and hosted The Self-Love Cabaret: l’amour se conjugue à la première personne (2012-22), résistance//résidence (2012), Home Invasion: Queers Shaking the Foundations of all White Houses (2015), Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists (2016-18), SPEAK B(L)ACK: a Black History Month Spoken Word Show (2016-19), and Voix et Résiliences (2019). In 2016, they were named one of 9 artists whose work is making a difference in Canada by CBC/Radio Canada.

In 2012, alongside artist and illustrator Elisha Lim, Kama co-founded 2-qtbipocmontreal, an arts collective to visibilize queer and trans artists of color in Montréal. 2-qtbipocmontreal later became the Qouleur Festival (2013-16). Kama has been an artist mentor with the AMY Project (Artists Mentoring Youth) in Toronto since 2017, and was the founder and Artistic Director of Trans Gemmes: The AMY Project’s Creative Mentorship Program for Trans Women and Femmes (2017-20). In Spring 2017, alongside Nikki Shaffeeulah and Aliyah Jamal, they co-designed and co-facilitated Parallel Tracks, a national training program in community arts facilitation for racialized artists. Between 2017 and 2019, Kama designed and directed Our Bodies, Our Stories, a qtbipoc writing and performance mentorship program with Project 10 in Montréal, mentoring over 40 emerging queer and trans artists of color, aged 18-25.

Kama has received multiple residencies, including at the Robert’s Street Social Centre in Halifax (2015), the P. Lantz Initiative for Excellence in Education and the Arts at McGill University (2016-17), the Alliance Program at the MAI (Montréal, Arts Interculturels) (2018-20), the SummerWorks Lab Residency in Toronto (2020), and the Incandescences educational archives residency at the PHI Foundation, Montréal (2021). They were also the invited critical writer at DARE-DARE on the subject of translation (2021-22) and the critical thinker on decoloniality at Espace Perreault (2021-23).

Kama’s debut poetry collection, ZOM-FAM (2020), was widely acclaimed, named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ2S+ Writers. They also won the Author of the Year award at the Gala Dynastie. Their second book, Indrazaal et la quête de l’océan (Éditions KATA), published in 2023, presents a poetic narrative on the ecology of islands.

Kama’s literary work in English, French, and Kreol has been published in Lettres Québécoises, Mœbius, Canadian Theatre Review, Ellipse Magazine, and in the anthologies Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (Publication Studio), We Mark Your Memory: Writings from Descendants of Indenture (University of London and Commonwealth Writers), Self-Care (Hamac), and 11 brefs essais queer (Hamac).

Their literary translations include Kai Cheng Thom’s children’s books, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (L’enfant de fourrure, de plumes, d’écailles, de feuilles et de paillettes) and For Laika: The Dog Who Learned the Names of the Stars (Pour Laïka: La chienne qui a rencontré les étoiles), as well as Kai Cheng Thom’s novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (Fèms magnifiques et dangereuses). They have also translated Vivek Shraya’s essay I’m Afraid of Men (J’ai peur des hommes), Sydney Hegele’s novel The Pump (Le Marais), and Valérie Bah’s short story collection Les Enragé·es (The Rage Letters).

Kama’s visual and performative work has been presented in Montréal at venues such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, La Galerie de l’UQAM, the Centre d’art de l’UDEM, the Musée régional de Rimouski, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, articule, the MAI (Montréal, Arts Interculturels), the Fonderie Darling, the Monument National, Studio 303, and Studio XX. They have also participated in festivals such as MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, Af-flux: Biennale transnationale noire, Off the Page, Sisters in Motion, Festival Phénomena, Festival SOIR, HTMlles, Qouleur, and Festival AccèsAsie.

Nationally, they have performed and exhibited across Canada, including at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (Toronto), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Verses Festival of Words (Vancouver), La Maison de la Littérature (Québec), Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton), and during Winnipeg’s Black History Month.

Internationally, they have presented their work at venues such as the Schwules Museum (Berlin), The Point of Order Gallery (Johannesburg), Cooper Union Gallery (New York), Burlington City Arts (Burlington), Yale University (New Haven), The Hackney Attic (London), The School for New Dance Performance (Amsterdam), and Galerie Confluences (Paris).

In 2021, they were awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts, and in 2023, they presented their solo exhibition Who Sings the Queer Island Body? at the McClure Gallery, Visual Arts Centre, Montréal.

Kama was born in Mauritius to a mixed-race Kreol (Afro-descendent) and Tamil family, descendants of slaves and indentured laborers. Growing up at the intersection of two ethnicities, two religions, and three languages, and being “zom-fam” (i.e., man-woman or transgender), Kama occupies multiple hybrid spaces, navigating bodies, cultures, territories, and languages in the search for a home.