Maya Rakitova was born in Smolensk, the Soviet Union, on June 4, 1931. In 1954, she graduated from the Faculty of Radio and Television at the Bonch-Bruevich Leningrad Electro-Technical Institute of Communications. Maya, her husband and their youngest daughter immigrated to Montreal in 1981. There, Maya worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for seventeen years. Maya and her husband live in Montreal.