Barâa Arar is a writer, editor, and cultural policy analyst based in Toronto, Canada. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in THIS Magazine, cbc.ca, Canthius, Room, Rowayat, Ex-Puritan, and Muslim American Writers at Home. In 2025, author Zilla Jones selected Barâa as a mentee for the Writer’s Union BIPOC Writers Connect. Currently, she is currently working on a debut novel, thanks to grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council (TAC).

Born in Montreal and raised in Ottawa, Barâa has served on the editorial committee of Between the Lines Books, editing two chapters of the pandemic anthology Sick of the System, and as a member of the TAC Literary Committee for a four-year term.

Barâa is a Rhodes Scholar finalist and the recipient of the Carleton Provost Scholar Award for community engagement and immersive research. She holds a Bachelor of Humanities from Carleton University and a Master’s in History from the University of Toronto where she studied colonialism, photography, and gender in North Africa, where she was the recipient of a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship Master’s Grant (2019).

She writes stories about Muslim women, faith in a secular world, and the visual art that moves us.