WRITING & EDITING
Samara co-edited The Colour of Madness: Mental Health and Race in Technicolour (2022, Pan Macmillan) and co-authored Diane Abbott: The Authorised Biography (2020, Biteback Publishing). She has contributed to Rethinking Labour’s Past (2022, IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury) and Understanding ‘Race’ and Ethnicity (2019, Bristol University Press).
Her bylines appear across major platforms, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Metro, Women’s Health Magazine, Huffington Post UK, New Economics, Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Samara also served on the editorial board for the BMJ’s award-winning Racism in Medicine special issue (2020).
Samara has won several writing awards, including ‘Best New Journalist’ (2016, Ending Violence Against Women Media Awards) and F. M. R. Walshe and Wilfred Francis White Prize in Neurology (2016, University College London).
[View Samara’s writing porfolio]
“hard-working, creative, and intelligent”
nick mulligan, bbc
AUDIO
Production credits include Science in Action (BBC World Service), Health Check (BBC World Service), CrowdScience (BBC World Service), The Evidence (BBC World Service), and the Techish podcast. Reporting credits include BBC Inside Science (BBC Radio 4), Health Check (BBC World Service), and Science in Action (BBC World Service).
[View playlists featuring Samara’s audio production and reporting work].
“An incredibly knowledgeable, charismatic and passionate expert, she’ll deliver an engaging and data driven event on mental health and racism that has the potential to drive real change.”
Gaby triess, google
EVENTS
Samara has given talks and led workshops at educational, non-profit, and corporate events on a range of topics, including mental health, equality, and diversity. Clients include Google, Pinterest, Cambridge Better Futures, Lundbeck, Women of the World Festival, Black Cultural Archives, New Internationalist, Mad Millennials, ARTIQ, and Project Myopia. She has also spoken at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Black Girl Fest, Re:generate festival, Awomenfest, and the Royal African Society.
“I would recommend to anyone considering a speaker, workshop designer or consultant on issues of health, inequalities, gender, race, mental health etc.”
rhianna ilube, the advocacy academy
RESEARCH
Samara’s research investigates how social, cultural, and structural forces shape health, with a particular focus on racialised inequities in mental health. She has presented her work at national and international conferences and served on the 2024–2025 MQ Fellows Award Committee, which provides up to $250,000 in funding to early-career mental health researchers.
In 2016, Samara co-edited a report for the Africa All-Party Parliamentary Group on lessons from the Ebola crisis, which parliamentarians praised as “open and honest” and “extremely useful and well-written.”
More recently, she completed a Master’s degree in Health Humanities with distinction and Dean’s List recognition for research exploring Black women’s mental health narratives. Grounded in Black feminist epistemology, Samara’s work centres lived experience as a critical source of knowledge and positions Black women as agents of meaning-making amid intersecting racialised and gendered oppressions.
Samara understands Black women’s marginality as a spatial and temporal site of resistance, a place where creativity, critique, and knowledge production challenge oppression and expand our understandings of what it means to be human.
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