Their work is intimate -- memoirs, Tedtalk/séances, private dances, 'texting plays', MP3 meditations, epistolary performances written to dream lovers -- a fierce mucking about with vulnerability to get at life as a former runaway, third generation Magyar settler and genderqueer.

Tanya’s book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway (Little A, 2018) was named a Best Queer & History Bio by The Advocate; a punk-musical version commissioned by Theatre Conspiracy toured nationally; Nocturne (an incomplete and inaccurate account of the love affair between George Sand and Frederic Chopin) was produced at Manhattan’s Dixon Place, Transmission, based on Sophocles’ Orestia, was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, Tanya’s play about being a sleep talker, was the subject of an NPR Invisibila. Their essays have appeared in Medium, huffpost, Grain, CdnTimes, Plentitude, DanceGeist, Lesbians Are Miracles and OffAssignment; their performances have been presented at PuSh, VIDF, Dancing on the Edge, rEvolver, Summerworks, The Tank, Brooklyn Museum, BAX, and The Collapsable Hole. They have worked with JoAnne Akalaitis, Jerome Bel, Ballez, Jess Barbagallo, Mallory Catlett, Fay Nass, frank theatre, Emily Johnson, the only animal, radix, and the Leaky Heaven Circus.

Awards include a 2022 Pushcart nomination; Sydney J. Risk Award; Vancouver Mayor’s Art Award and the shortlist for the CBC Literary Award. Their work has been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts Emergency Grants, American Association of University Women, the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Hertog Fellowship; residencies include the Banff Centre for the Arts, Tender Container, Playwrights Theatre Centre, folda, Mabou Mines, VIVO, and the Caravan Farm theatre. Tanya received their BFA in Theatre at Simon Fraser University and an MFA in Creative NonFiction at Hunter College, where they teach memoir in the English and Women & Gender Studies Department. 

As a third generation Magyar settler on the stolen, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and Skwxwú7mesh Nations and in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape People, and Canarsie and Munsee Nations, Tanya acknowledges the damaging effects of colonialism on these lands and its peoples and is committed to reconciliation. They stand for the protection of these territories and homelands, and offer art as a gesture of care to all of our relations, past, present, and future.

(photo by David B. Smith)