Tanya Tagaq

The Inuk throat singer, avant-garde composer, actor, and bestselling author Tanya Tagaq is renowned as one of Canada’s most original and celebrated artists. Hailing from Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktutiak), Nunavut, Tanya Tagaq carves the traditional practice of throat singing into a form of ancestral resonance wherein improvisation, electronic experimentation, and the immediacy of visual and performance art form a new ritual: part confrontation, part survival. Across mediums, her work is a channel for urgency, healing while insisting upon transformation.

Recognized with major awards, national honors, and critical acclaim, Tagaq has also become a formidable voice in literature and on the screen. Her written works includes 2018’s »Split Tooth«, a genre-blending novel mixing memoir, poetry, myth, and Inuit folklore with vivid depictions of growing up in Nunavut. She is also the author of the picture books »It Bears Repeating« and »I Would Give You My Tail«. Across the pages, landscapes of resistance and renewal bear witness to colonial erasure, ecological crisis, and the endurance of Indigenous life. Tagaq also co-directed and wrote the documentary 2022’s »Ever Deadly«, a portrait of her life and art. A member of the Order of Canada, Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates, Tagaq is an original disruptor, a world-changing figure advocating for seismic social, political and environmental change.