Shawna Tavsky
Artist • Therapist • Consultant
Exploring art as a living process and a reflective space within human experience.
Shawna’s practice is grounded in art thinking, bringing perceptual inquiry and psychological insight together through thoughtful, attentive exploration.Trained in somatic psychology and art psychotherapy, she specializes in complex trauma, chronic stress, and anxiety through a neurodivergent-affirming lens.
Late-diagnosed with AuDHD (Autism & ADHD), her lived experience navigating sensory realities, societal expectations, and complex trauma informs her commitment to supporting others in their own processes of discovery, meaning-making, and connection.
After relocating to Mexico City from Montreal in 2011, she co-founded a contemporary arts and circus center and spent a decade developing arts-education programs. She later taught at the Canadian International Institute for Art Therapy and presented at the Art and Mental Health Symposium at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM, 2024).
Arte Soma
Launching in 2026, Arte Soma brings together Shawna’s experience in arts, health and education to develop a creative learning space that nurtures artistic ways of thinking and being.
Art Thinking
An approach attuned to how experience is sensed, interpreted, understood, and made meaningful.
Art thinking guides the work I do. It’s not about making art — it’s a way of seeing that brings perception, reflection, imagination, and analysis into conversation. Art thinking offers a broader, more attentive way of engaging with experience, noticing nuance, staying curious, and allowing meaning to emerge without forcing it.
It begins with attention. Small shifts in light, tone, context, mood, or pattern shape how we interpret the world, often before we’re aware of it. When we slow down enough to notice these subtleties, thinking becomes more flexible, layered, and insightful.
Unlike design thinking, which moves toward solutions, or therapeutic art, which focuses on outcomes, art thinking values process, questioning, and exploration. It welcomes complexity and opens space for new possibilities rather than familiar answers.
Across my work, this approach brings depth and spaciousness so that insight can emerge through attention, reconsideration, and openness to what else might be possible.
A creative learning space - launching soon!
Exploring how we experience the world through creativity, perception, and presence.
Rooted in the emerging field of neuroarts, blending psychology, art, and sensory awareness, Arte Soma invites you to engage your creative wisdom as a pathway to deeper self-awareness and connection.
Inner Worlds Online Course
Portraits
In Mexico City
Portrait sessions are a gentle play between stillness, movement, and inner-world exploration. A moment of attention, authenticity, and being seen.
Work in progress.
In Between
A phenomenological exploration of presence — where inner experience and outward appearance meet through drawing and portraiture.
Work in progress.
The Woman in the Film
My first novel.
Fragments of the process on Instagram.
@the_woman_in_the_film
“She listens to voices in the walls, dreams of a gentle stream, dances alone, and whispers songs of wildflowers to the wind. Dark secrets play tricks inside her mind as she wanders in her white vintage dress, somewhere between this world and another.“
Say Hello!
Whether you have a question, an idea, or simply want to connect, send me a note below.