Northern Dial Artist Profile

Tanya Tagaq

Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada

Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq, from Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay), Nunavut, transformed a tradition normally practiced by two singers into a fiercely individual improvisational language. She began experimenting with throat singing after leaving home for high school in Yellowknife, then developed a solo approach while studying visual art in Nova Scotia. Collaborations with artists including Björk and the Kronos Quartet brought that voice into international experimental-music settings, but Tagaq's work has never treated Inuit sound as a texture to be placed inside somebody else's framework. Her performances use breath, growls, cries, melody and physical improvisation to create music that can feel as close to free jazz, metal and contemporary composition as to conventional song form.

The 2014 album Animism became a national breakthrough when it won the Polaris Music Prize, with the jury recognizing a record that refused to soften either its sound or its politics. Retribution followed in 2016 with an even more explicit focus on colonial violence, environmental destruction and bodily autonomy. Tagaq later extended the same creative world into literature with the genre-blurring book Split Tooth, longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English. On 2022's Tongues, produced by Saul Williams, passages drawn from Split Tooth were set against industrial and electronic production, making the relationship between her writing and music especially direct.

Tagaq's 2026 album Saputjiji pushed that language into ambient, electronic and filmic sound design while confronting militarism, colonial systems and economic power. Across music, writing, visual art and performance, she has become one of the most internationally visible contemporary Inuk artists in Canada without reducing Inuit identity to heritage presentation. Her 2014 Polaris win, 2015 JUNO for Aboriginal Recording of the Year and 2016 appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada reflect the institutional recognition, but her larger importance lies in how forcefully she has expanded the space available to Indigenous experimental art on major Canadian and international stages.