Sarena Parmar

Ethnicity: South Asian (Sikh)
Occupation and/or Company: Actor and Playwright
Years of experience: 18 years

Personal & professional philosophy:
Art is a form of public service. It opens the heart.

Upcoming performances/ project:
Acting in The Roof is Leaking, for Pleiades Theatre, playing at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre from May 8 to May 18, 2025. The play is about a middle-class Punjabi family in Brampton, Ontario. When the father’s death brings this dysfunctional family to its knees, their mother attempts to divorce her dead husband to recapture her personal freedom.

What is the highlight of your work?
Writing my first play, The Orchard (After Chekhov). The play was a profoundly personal story based on my family’s history of fruit farming in the Okanagan Valley, BC in the 1970s. It premiered at the Shaw Festival, making me the first South Asian playwright produced in the festival’s 50-year history.

Future goals:
As an artist, to think on a larger scale, to think bigger, to pursue stories that are poetic and ambitious.