Inside the Mind of Kamika Bianca-Guerra Walker

Born in Calgary of a Jamaican father and a Chilean mother, Kamika was destined to stand out from an early age. Growing up, she was cultivated and grounded through her working class roots — her father worked as a barber while her mother worked in the casino industry. Kamika believes her early experiences spent at the barbershop, with figures like Oscar Micheaux and Cheryl Foggo, as well as her adolescent years at the Alberta School of Ballet, influenced much of her current creative ventures as an artist.

Kamika’s road to larger projects like Netflix’s Black in Canada and the HBO/Crave sensation The Last of Us was paved by a path of resilience. When Walker was six years old, her father was diagnosed with schizophrenia. This shattering reality, accompanied by his later struggles with homelessness, radically changed Kamika’s approach to life and how she viewed the world.

As a woman of faith, empathy and kindness had already been a part of Kamika’s core. It was the struggles in her family, however, that rolled it all into motion. Her initial passion was to be a doctor, and she was a psychiatrist student at the University of Calgary for three years. However, Kamika grew to believe this was not the path for her, and eventually unenrolled from the university. This did not derail her efforts to continue to focus on inwardness, the conscious mind, and how people react to struggles.

Kamika…