Shawna Tavsky is an interdisciplinary artist, therapist, and creative facilitator whose work centers on perception, attention, and the lived experience of making meaning. Her practice integrates art-making with a focus on how experience is sensed, interpreted, and shaped over time.
Artistic Practice
Shawna’s work is process-based and grounded in attentive spontaneity. Meaning emerges through the act of making, through intuitive, responsive dialogue with the work as it forms, whether through photography, portraiture, mixed-media drawing, or writing. Her photographs and video pieces transmit intimacy in stillness and movement, her mixed-media drawings give form to intangible inner states, and her writing extends the poetic language present in her visual work into words.
Perspective & Lived Experience
Shawna’s perspective is informed by lived experience, including a late diagnosis of AuDHD and many years of adapting within systems not designed for perceptual or neurodivergent ways of working. These experiences sharpened her sensitivity to internal states, relational dynamics, and the effects of attention, pacing, and environment on human experience.
Rather than functioning as subject matter, these realities shape how she works — emphasizing clarity, precision, and respect for complexity without pathologizing difference.
Background
Originally from Canada, Shawna relocated from Montreal to Mexico City in 2011, where she co-founded and co-directed Casa de Artes y Circo Contemporáneo A.C. for a decade — an arts and circus center focused on arts education and community development.
Her video work has been screened and recognized at festivals worldwide, receiving a first-place award at the BANG Video Art Festival (Best Screendance, Spain, 2016), a second-place award at Agite y Sirva (Mexico, 2015), and a semi-finalist designation at the Best Short Film Festival (Toronto, 2021). In 2021, she was commissioned to create video art and photography for JJRR Architecture’s presentation at the Biennale di Venezia.
Her photography has appeared in editorial publications online and in print, including National Geographic Education, United Nations Press, and various newspapers and magazines. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
She volunteers in support of Jaime Black and The REDress Project, an ongoing Indigenous memorial art installation that draws attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
She completed postgraduate studies in Body Psychology and Body Psychotherapy (MSc, University of East London) as well as advanced clinical training in Art Psychotherapy with the Canadian International Institute for Art Therapy. She has taught at CiiAT (2022) and presented at UNAM’s Art and Mental Health Symposium (2024).
Prior to her focus on art psychotherapy and psychology, she maintained a long-standing creative practice offering multidisciplinary freelance work across visual design, creative direction, and photography for artists, architects, and small studios — work that spanned from 2002 to 2021.
Current Work
Shawna maintains a private therapy practice and accepts occasional referrals.
apertura is a space for attention, perception and creative inquiry. It brings together her work in psychology, education and the arts into tools, guides, and 1:1 sessions — grounded in her Art Thinking framework.