Samanta Krishnapillai (she/her)
Samanta holds a Bachelor of Health Sciences and a Master of Health Information Science from Western University. Her training focused on health equity, the social determinants of health, and how information moves (and fails to move) through institutions and communities. She brings that evidence-informed lens, knowledge translation, and a healthy intolerance for nonsense to Canadian politics, public health, culture, and human rights. Her writing connects headlines to history and power, names the systems behind the harm, and gives readers somewhere to go next, because changing the world is a group project. Her work has been recognized by ELLE Canada, Best Health, Future of Good and Egale.
Samanta is the first in her family to be born in Canada, in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), on the traditional lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Her parents are Tamil refugees who survived Black July, the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, and were forced from their ancestral homeland amid state-sanctioned persecution and genocidal violence against Tamil people, rooted in a history shaped by centuries of European colonialism.
She holds both truths at once: belonging to a family displaced by colonial violence, and benefiting from ongoing settler colonialism in Canada. That tension shapes how she writes about justice, solidarity, and who we owe what to. It’s also why she identifies as a collectivist and sees her role in the world as a future ancestor: honouring those who came before her by fighting for a future worthy of those who come after.
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