Calgary / Mohkinstsis
Sara-Maya Kaba
I'm a spoken word poet, dancer, and visual artist. My art explores identity, memory, and South Asian womanhood, and aims to make space for the stories and experiences of racialized, immigrant, and third-culture communities. My artistry is rooted in community, and facilitating and teaching are part of my practice too.
I'm an Artist Changemaker in Residence at Mount Royal University's Institute for Community Prosperity, and co-founder and Artistic Director of The Fourth Space, an arts nonprofit focused on creating joyful, playful spaces for adults and youth.
A line from my poetry
I come from women who rolled grief into rotis and still fed the whole house. I am the daughter of partitioned maps and unpartitioned courage.from Daughter of Many Mothers, performed live, March 2026
About
Sara-Maya Kaba is a poet, spoken word artist, dancer, and aspiring visual artist, and a community arts practitioner. She uses movement, creative writing, and visual storytelling to explore mental health, identity, memory, and South Asian womanhood, and is currently experimenting with alcohol ink as a new way of working with emotion, colour, and creativity.
She is an Artist Changemaker in Residence at Mount Royal University, and co-founder and Artistic Director of The Fourth Space, a nonprofit that uses art, play, and story to build connection and mental health literacy across communities in Calgary and Pakistan.
She wrote and directed Severing Roots, a spoken word performance with six Muslim women artists on Islamophobia, and performed in Passages, a large-scale dance production exploring Muslim diasporic stories in Canada. She performed her poetry piece The Edges of the Map and her dance Ajrak as part of Beyond the Postcard.
She has performed across Canada, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan, and has taught at the Kingston School of Dance, Queen's University, and as a guest instructor for Blissful Dance Studios. She is also a teaching artist for the Jube School at SAIT and a guest educator with the Calgary Board of Education.
A Pathy Foundation Fellowship alum, she designed and led an arts-based mental health literacy program that reached over 500 participants across Pakistan. She holds a Bachelor of Education with a specialization in Arts in Community Education and a Bachelor of Arts in International Development Studies, both from Queen's University.