Photo by Sarah Tanase
Kanika Lawton is a Cambodian-Chinese Canadian writer, editor, and film scholar from Vancouver, British Columbia.
She is an incoming PhD student at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute and part of the Collaborative Specialization at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship and the 2021-2022 Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC) Graduate Student Representative. Her research contends with how the construction of the self via online performance and personas, notions of "passing" within queer and racialized communities, and the relationship between whiteness and technology are formed, disrupted, and rebuilt through tools of state and interstate surveillance.
She holds a Bachelor's of Arts in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Master's of Arts from the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute. She has presented her scholarly research across Canada and the United States, most notably at Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA)'s annual conference, the University of Toronto, Columbia University, Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. Her peer-reviewed article on reimagining utopian thinking and (counter)memories in Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer (2018) is published in Spectator. She also served as an editor with the UBC Undergraduate Film Student Association and The Neutral: Graduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, a peer-reviewed, graduate student-led journal run out of the University of Toronto.
Kanika is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of L'Éphémère Review, Staff Director of Sundress Publications, and a poetry reader for Cotton Xenomorph. She has received fellowships from Pink Door and BOAAT Writer's Retreat and has been published in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Longleaf Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Parentheses Journal, and perhappened mag, among others. A four-time Pushcart Prize and three-time Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of the micro-chapbooks Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018), Loneliness, and Other Ways to Split a Body (Ghost City Press, 2018), Monster (Girl) Theory (post ghost press, 2019), and Theories on Wreckage (Ghost City Press, 2020).
She is an incoming PhD student at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute and part of the Collaborative Specialization at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship and the 2021-2022 Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC) Graduate Student Representative. Her research contends with how the construction of the self via online performance and personas, notions of "passing" within queer and racialized communities, and the relationship between whiteness and technology are formed, disrupted, and rebuilt through tools of state and interstate surveillance.
She holds a Bachelor's of Arts in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Master's of Arts from the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute. She has presented her scholarly research across Canada and the United States, most notably at Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA)'s annual conference, the University of Toronto, Columbia University, Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. Her peer-reviewed article on reimagining utopian thinking and (counter)memories in Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer (2018) is published in Spectator. She also served as an editor with the UBC Undergraduate Film Student Association and The Neutral: Graduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, a peer-reviewed, graduate student-led journal run out of the University of Toronto.
Kanika is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of L'Éphémère Review, Staff Director of Sundress Publications, and a poetry reader for Cotton Xenomorph. She has received fellowships from Pink Door and BOAAT Writer's Retreat and has been published in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Longleaf Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Parentheses Journal, and perhappened mag, among others. A four-time Pushcart Prize and three-time Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of the micro-chapbooks Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018), Loneliness, and Other Ways to Split a Body (Ghost City Press, 2018), Monster (Girl) Theory (post ghost press, 2019), and Theories on Wreckage (Ghost City Press, 2020).
