Tanja Faylene Woloshen was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and likely because of this prairie upbringing, has always been attentive to space and expansive perspectives. Aside from Winnipeg, she has lived in Calgary, on the BC coastline, in the BC interior, in the Hawaiian Islands, and travels with every opportunity. Throughout the years, her dance praxis has expanded from codified forms of ballet, jazz, and modern, to integrate the organic and instinctual forms of improvisation, and Japanese Butoh. She works between dance, theatre, performance, installation, collage, wellness, philosophy, product, & process. She has performed in community gardens, restaurant basements, and at international festivals. Her early years were immersed in studying at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, U Calgary's Dance Program, and at Maindance (Vancouver). She is a Theatre graduate from U Winnipeg (BA Hon.), has an MFA in Performance Studies from UBC-Okanagan, and also a BEd from U Winnipeg. Tanja has graciously received numerous grants to support her practice, from Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council, UBC, and U Manitoba. Alongside her art, she maintains a steady dance and theatre education practice for all ages.
interests: dance of ALL kinds, devised theatre, tanztheatre, Butoh, Bodyweather, contemporary art, site specific performance, contemplative arts, collaborative practices, yoga, somatics, costume & fashion design, sculpture, installation, collage, queer studies, indigenous studies, traditional knowledges, eastern philosophies, shamanism, shapeshifting, altered states, expressive art therapies, biophilia, thanatology, heutology, somatic imagination, play, lyrical writing, cultural ecology, failure, dreams, water bodies, rhizomes, fungi, octopi, cats
Gratitude to live and create on Treaty 1, the ancestral territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, and Oji-Cree Nations as well as the homeland of the Red River Métis Nation.