Shawna Tavsky
Artist • Therapist • Consultant
Exploring art as a living process and a reflective space within human experience.
Shawna’s practice brings perceptual inquiry and psychological insight into a thoughtful, attentive relationship. Rooted in somatic psychology and art psychotherapy, her work centers complex trauma, chronic stress, and anxiety through a neurodivergent-affirming lens.
Late-diagnosed with AuDHD (Autism and ADHD), her lived experience adds another layer to her approach. Moving through sensory realities, societal expectations, and complex trauma has shaped her commitment to supporting others in their own ways of knowing, healing, and connecting.
After relocating from Montreal to Mexico City in 2011, she co-founded a contemporary arts and circus center where she spent a decade developing arts-education programs. She has also taught at the Canadian International Institute for Art Therapy (2022), as well as presented at the Art and Mental Health Symposium at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM, 2024).
Her experiences continue to inform the clarity and care she brings to her work.
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. Instead, it’s a way of seeing that brings perception, reflection, imagination, and analysis into conversation. In this way, art thinking offers a broader, more attentive way of engaging with experience. It also invites you to notice nuance, stay curious, and allow 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, and 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 which blends psychology, art, and sensory awareness, Arte Soma invites you to engage your creative wisdom as a pathway to deeper self-awareness and connection.
Portraits
In Mexico City
Portrait sessions are a gentle play between stillness, movement, and inner-world exploration. They offer 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 both drawing and portraiture.
Work in progress.
“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.