Kama La Mackerel

Bio

Kama La Mackerel is a multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who holds a deep faith in love, justice, and individual and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the boundaries of traditional artistic disciplines to create aesthetic spaces where decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary approach— developed over the past decade— is rooted in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research, and community-arts facilitation.

Kama has presented their work in various national and international contexts, including La Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal, Arts Interculturels (MAI), the Musée régional de Rimouski, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (Toronto), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Schwules Museum (Berlin), the School for New Dance Development (Amsterdam), La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), Point of Order Gallery (Johannesburg), as well as at Yale and Harvard Universities in the United States.

They are the author of two books: Indrazaal et la quête de l’océan (Éditions KATA, 2023) and ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press, 2020), which was a finalist for several literary awards and named a “Best Poetry Book” by CBC ​Books and a “Best Debut” by The Globe and Mail. In 2021, they received the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for Emerging and Mid-Career ​in Visual Art​s from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Alongside their artistic practice, Kama is a dedicated educator, having spent almost 15 years as an arts facilitator working with marginalized communities and teaching decolonial practices in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University​, where they are the Artist-in-Residence during the Winter 2025 semester.

Born and raised in Mauritius, Kama lived in Pune, India, and Peterborough, Ontario, before settling in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in 2012.

Teaching

2022, DANC 398 - Inclusive Practices in Dance

2024, DANC 403 - Sustainability Practices in Dance