Biography

Samara’s musical education began at age 4 with the violin. She greatly enjoyed acting and singing, and performed in many musicals and plays until she switched to vocal studies in her mid-teens. She attended Carleton University (Bachelor of Music, Honours) and the University of Ottawa (Master of Music) where she trained formally in classical voice (art song, chamber music, and opera). She has studied under the tutelage of Christiane Riel, Dominique Labelle, and many others, and has sung roles such as Papagena (Die Zauberflöte), The Rooster (The Cunning Little Vixen), and Noémie (Cendrillon). She is the recipient of the 2019 Harry Brown Senior Scholarship for the Kiwanis Music Festival (Capital Region), the 2016 NATS Senior Scholarship, and the 2011 W.H. Scrivens Trophy (Kiwanis, Capital Region). She now collaborates with pianist and composer Asher Darling in their art song duo, Darling & Garfinkle. Samara has been teaching voice in her private studio for a decade.

In 2020, struggling with chronic physical pain and performance anxiety and with the onset of the pandemic, Samara turned her attention to mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being; she decided that it was time to return to school to study psychology. She had always been fascinated with analytical psychology, her father having been a psychoanalyst by trade, but now she developed a particular interest in psychosensory and somatic approaches, which began with mindfulness meditation. A wonderful turning point for her was in finding a therapist who utilized EFT, which inspired Samara to begin using the tool with her vocal students who suffered from performance anxiety and other stressors. Eventually, she pursued formal training with energy therapist Susan Bushell, as well as psychotherapist, music therapist and pioneering researcher Dr. Shelley Snow. Samara has trained in Vipassana (Insight) Meditation, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), Mindfulness-Based Inner Repatterning (MBIR), and Sound Therapy with specialization in a technique known as "vocal toning." She is an Accredited Practitioner with EFT International and a certified Sound Therapist with the Dorian Centre for the Healing Arts.

Samara wrote for her own enjoyment from an early age. She was awarded 5th place in a Canada-wide short fiction competition for teens (Butterfly 208) at age 15, but did not share her work again publicly until she was introduced to the Montreal poetry community in 2021. Her interest in psychology (and penchant for the theories of C.G. Jung) has always—unconsciously and consciously—informed her symbolic style of writing, which includes an affinity for fables and fairy tales. Samara’s debut chapbook of poetry, Dual Realms, was released with Cactus Press in the summer of 2022. She has had her work published in various journals online and in-print, and her poem, "The She-Raven," was nominated for the 2024 Best of the Net Awards. She has been a facilitator for McGill University’s Poetry Matters series, an adjudicator for Carleton University’s “Poetry & Songwriting” competition, and a featured performer and poet for events such as The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, The Words and Music Show for the Quebec Writers’ Federation, The Argo Bookshop Reading Series, The Lawn Chair Soirée, and others. In 2022, she became the new host and co-coordinator of SpeakUp:  The Montreal Interactive Poetry Exchange, a monthly reading series with featured readers and audience participation in the form of discussion and Q&A.