Helana Marie Boutros is a practicing Coptic Orthodox Christian, whose faith shapes and motivates all spheres of her life. She grew up in the Church of St. Mary and St. Athanasius in Mississauga, Ontario and serves there with her community.

In her academic world and beyond, Helana considers herself a storyteller and a steward of words, first and foremost. As a Coptic interdisciplinary scholar and training anthropologist, she sees her current doctoral work as a gift back to her Coptic community. She completed her Bachelors of Health Sciences with a Double Minor in Psychology and Liberal Arts at Redeemer University in April 2022, and completed her Masters in Public Health with a field specialization in Indigenous Health at the University of Toronto in August 2023. Currently, she is a SSHRC CGS-D-funded PhD candidate at McMaster University, where her thesis ethnographically thinks with Coptic Orthodox women as they pursue spiritual health, and how these experiences shape and frame their encounters with Western imaginaries of mental health and biomedicine in the Greater Toronto Area. In this work, she foregrounds the anthropologies of health/medicine, the life of the senses, and Orthodox Christianity, and draws heavily on cultural psychology and transcultural psychiatry. She hopes that this written work can help readers think about the world differently, while preserving the stories of Coptic women in an authentic and beautiful way.