Chandra is a black and mixed race settler, born in Terrace BC to a single 23 year old mom who ran track and field. She grew up watching her parents train and started running at nine years old out of pure boredom. Sports and a childhood modelling career, gave her incredible discipline and resiliency, access to higher education, and the sense that her physical body was inherently a transactional implement that could be commodified.

She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a focus in American politics, and additionally, Studio Fine Arts from Rice University. She studied national defence policy in Houston during the War in Iraq, evacuated from hurricanes and celebrated in the streets when the first black president was elected. Even though her courses on the Electoral College and Health Policy swiftly turned her into a staunch anarchist.

Chandra studied International Brand Management and Social Services in college, and has a JD from the University of Windsor, where she was integral in several social justice initiatives, including working with faculty to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Recommendations. Chandra has won various awards and scholarships.

Drawn to the intersection of advocacy, art and regulation, Chandra has worked in a variety of different capacities, including articling at a major Bay Street law firm and later at digital learning tech startups. She follows interesting work and experiences, which has allowed her to live in Switzerland and the mountains in Morelos, Mexico. She dreams of art and action.

Her latest role will be her life’s work. As a former member of the community, she is a fierce and adept advocate for sex workers in Canada. She regularly partners with other sister organizations and agencies, and is an active member of the Canadian Alliance of Sex Work Law Reform, the applicant in the Charter Challenge to Bill C-36, seeking to decriminalize sex work in Canada. She is strictly impatient with narrow views of sex workers, holds unwavering disdain for the police and most institutions, and has no problem expressing these views in interviews, which are frequent.

Because she believes that sex workers are magic.

And, supremely resourceful, resilient and simply deserve to be free in whatever way they choose to be. In the least, she insists that her community is considered as a critical component to the changing infrastucture of Toronto, and demands equitable access to housing, food security, healthcare and access to justice.

Chandra is happily divorced and now a single mother herself, to two round puggles, named Skinny and Queso. Like most others that have faced marginalization, she has experienced moments of severe violence but counters her adverse lived experience with an unshakeable sense of levity and spirituality grounded in live music and long runs on the lake (but only when it’s warm out). Chandra found out at 37 that she had a different biological father, 6 more siblings and a new racial makeup. Not unexpected for a life of already so much lore.

Chandra means the moon in Sanskrit – and perhaps, even better – in some places, ‘light’.

She is 39.