Sanita Fejzić is a playwright, poet, and literary writer.
Her debut novella, Psychomachia, was shortlisted for the 2016 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest and the 2017 Canada ReLit Awards. Her children’s story, (M)other, was translated into French by Sylvie Nicolas as Mère(s) et monde. Sanita has published poetry and short stories in magazines across the country; she has won, and been nominated for, several awards including the CBC Poetry and Nonfiction prizes, among others.
Sanita started a project-specific, artist-run, theatre company, Blissful Productions, in 2019. Her play, Blissful State of Surrender, premiered at the Great Canadian Theatre Company on February 22, 2022. It was nominated for five Rideau Awards. Dana Užarević won Best Actress. In 2023, Sanita produced Why Worry About Their Futures at the undercurrents festival, a tryptic of three short plays: “The Sky It Falls” by Keith Barker, “The Auden Test” by Lawrence Aronovitch, and her short, “Expecting.”
Sanita articulated an artistic movement she calls Peasant Futurisms while completing her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Peasant Futurisms expresses peasant perspectives of the future, past, and present through organic subsistence farming, local gift and cyclical economies, and collaborative labour models. The child of Bosniak peasants, Sanita is into healing people and the planet through peasant subsistence farming, permaculture gardening, agro-ecology and organic regenerative agriculture (conservation and rehabilitation approaches to growing food).
In Sanita’s work, Peasant Futurisms poses a challenge to capitalist cities that center cars and big commerce by imagining edible and wilder eco-cities surrounded by peasant food belts. Her radio play, Machines and Moss, produced by the National Arts Centre as part of its Irresistible Neighbourhoods project, is part of the Peasant Futurist movement. Sanita has also developed an online course for the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Peasant Futurisms: Cultivating Delicious Futures, accessible for free.
She lives with her wife and two children on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people in Ottawa, Canada. Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, she fled the Siege of Sarajevo and genocide of her Bosniak people at the age of seven, and lived as a refugee, illegal immigrant, and “temporary guest” across three countries before seeking permanent refuge in Canada.
Fejzić is pronounced fey-zitch. If you can say Nietzsche, you can say Fejzić.