Shawna Tavsky is an interdisciplinary artist, therapist, and creative consultant 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 a contemporary arts and circus center and spent a decade developing arts and creative education programs.

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).

Alongside her academic and therapeutic work, she has maintained a long-standing creative practice, offering multidisciplinary freelance work across visual design, creative direction, and photography for artists, architects, and small studios since 2002.

Current Work

Shawna maintains a small, ongoing therapy practice with long-term clients and accepts occasional referrals. She also offers creative guidance for individuals seeking a more perceptive, grounded relationship to their creative process.

Arte Soma is the creative learning space where her work in art, perception, and education comes together — through perceptual practices, creative labs, and evolving learning formats that support attention, inquiry, and creative thinking.

Her work continues to evolve, guided by sustained interest in perception, connection, and how creative practice shapes ways of being in the world.