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. She has also 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 butoh. She works between dance, theatre, performance, installation, collage, wellness, philosophy, product, & process. She has performed in community gardens, restaurant basements, art galleries, theatres, and at international festivals. Her early years were immersed in studying at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, U Calgary's Dance Program, and at Maindance in Vancouver. She is a theatre grad from U Winnipeg (BA Hon.), has an MFA in dance and gender Studies from UBC-Okanagan, and 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, butoh, breathing, devised theatre, improvisation, Bodyweather, contemporary art, site specific performance, contemplative arts, collaborative practices, yoga, ecosomatics, land art, costume & fashion design, sculpture, installation, collage, queerness, indigenous practices, decolonizing practices, traditional knowledges, eastern philosophies, shamanism, shapeshifting, altered states, liminality, expressive art therapies, biophilia, death & grief practices, play, lyrical writing, cultural ecology, failure, dreams, water bodies, plant bodies, rhizomes, funga, octopi, cats, birds, ghosts, &, kindness
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.