Bruce Horak

Early Life and Education

Bruce Horak was born and raised in Calgary. He was diagnosed with bilateral retinoblastoma (cancer of the eye) when he was 18 months old. As a result, he lost more than 90 per cent of the vision in his left eye and his right eye was removed (he now wears a prosthetic). His father, Carl Horak, also survived the same disease with only one eye and visual impairment. He later died of esophageal cancer on Horak’s 29th birthday.

Horak has described his childhood household as “really artistic.” After the Quest Theatre company put on a play at Horak’s school when he was in Grade 3, he developed a passion for writing and theatre. He reportedly went home that day and told his mother, “I want to write stories like that. I want to write stories about kids like me.” Horak also played piano, drums and guitar and took art classes in junior high and high school. During his time in high school, he and a friend would often busk by singing on the street in downtown Calgary.

Theatre Career

While studying toward his theatre degree at Mount Royal College, Bruce Horak met Duval Lang, one of the co-founders of Quest Theatre. Horak became very involved with the company, acting in and writing numerous productions with Quest Theatre and other companies, including the Loose Moose Theatre. In 1999, Horak wrote and performed in What You Can’t See, a play for children about a boy who conceals his visual impairment from people. As he said in an interview with Postmedia, “I thought it would be great for the kids to see someone who was really deaf or really blind performing, so they could see that we’re just as normal as they are.”

In 2006, Horak debuted the 75-minute one-man show This Is Cancer at Toronto’s SummerWorks Theatre Festival. The dark yet poignant comedy features Horak playing an embodiment of cancer and includes a recording of Carl Horak dictating his obituary to his son a month before he died. The play had a successful run in Toronto before going on to play in New York City in 2010 and at the Edmonton and Vancouver Fringe festivals in 2010, 2011 and 2014.

In 2013, Horak premiered the one-man play Assassinating Thomson, in which he recounts the life and mysterious death of legendary painter Tom Thomson while painting a portrait of the audience in Thomson’s style. He performed the play more than 300 times across the country, including at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2022.

Painting Portraits

In 2011, Horak, who has painted since he was a child, began painting portraits of people as he sees them. He has described this as a liberating experience, as he had previously tried to “create work that looked like a sighted person created it.” An exhibition of his portraits called The Way I See It ran at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in September 2011. He has since set a goal to paint 1,000 personal portraits and had done more than 600 by July 2022.

Television Career

Bruce Horak made his television acting debut in the Toronto-shot SyFy series Warehouse 13 in 2010. He also appeared in two episodes of the CW series In the Dark in 2022, as well as in the TV movie Family History Mysteries: Buried Past (2023).

In 2022, Horak became Star Trek’s first blind actor when he was cast as Lieutenant Hemmer, a member of a species that is both blind and telepathic, in the streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022–23). In 2023 and 2024, Horak had a five-episode arc on the popular CTV medical procedural Transplant. Also in 2024, he starred in a Heritage Minute about Edwin A. Baker, co-founder of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB).

(See also Blindness and Visual Impairment.)