Tanya Lukin Linklater is a multidisciplinary Sugpiaq artist based in North Bay, ON, and Edmonton, AB. Her practice includes dance, performance, sculpture, works for camera, works on paper, and writing. She incorporates these mediums into dynamic, multidimensional performances and exhibitions that look at central concepts of embodiment and weather.
Lukin Linklater’s Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska. Growing up in Alaska and Colorado, she recalls being drawn to dance during an early trip to Anchorage, Alaska, where she first encountered Iñupiaq and Yupik dance. “I grew up not having access to customary practices. . . . I felt deeply moved by our ancestral practices . . . in a way that was so different from performance within theatre spaces,” she says. [1]
In 1996 Lukin Linklater became the first intern at the Alutiiq Museum, which sparked her interest in situating her work within museums. “There is this history of our ancestral belongings being collected by museums, and of course placed within these ethnographic, archaeological, and anthropologic spaces,” she says. In 1998, after completing her BA from Stanford University, Lukin Linklater travelled to Toronto, ON, to participate in the Centre for Indigenous Theatre’s (CIT) summer program. That same year she joined the inaugural full-time class at the CIT, where there was an emphasis on dance. “I was really interested in how, in my perception of dance, it felt open, compared to scripted plays. This way in which you could make performances that didn’t necessarily have these . . . European outcomes that I’d been participating in for a long time,” she says. She went on to complete a master of education from the University of Alberta (2003), and a PhD in cultural studies from Queen’s University (2023).
Lukin Linklater continued her practice at the Banff Centre for three summers, training in the Indigenous dance programs alongside choreographers and other dance artists, learning customary dance forms as well as contemporary dance. During this time, she started thinking of embodiment.
In 2009 Lukin Linklater moved to Ontario, where she started making photographs, videos, and performances with dance artists. She credits the support of the Ontario Arts Council, artist-run centres, other artists, and Indigenous curators for the development of her experimental art practice: “I feel really grateful for my colleagues across Ontario who believed in the work and believed in the different phases of the work over the last 17 years,” she says. Lukin Linklater’s complex, wide-ranging work cites Indigenous lived experience and artistic lineages and explores our relationships to these histories and ways of being. She is renowned for her collaborative site-specific performances created in dialogue with objects, scores, and ancestral belongings. This is seen in her 2026 solo exhibition Crested, which addresses the consequences of colonial dispossession and forms of cultural continuity in response to several Sugpiaq belongings that are currently in the Kunstkamera in Russia. The show includes bentwood sculptures, beadwork, textile work, and watercolours. In all of her work, Lukin Linklater situates herself in community with her family and the Sugpiaq people, as well as the Indigenous dance and contemporary art communities she has connected with throughout her career.
Artist residencies have been an important part of Lukin Linklater’s practice. She was selected in 2017 by the All My Relations Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for their inaugural annual Indigenous artist-in-residence. That same year, she was named the Art Gallery of Ontario’s artist-in-residence. Lukin Linklater has received numerous accolades, including the Wexner Center for the Arts Artist Residency Award in Visual Arts (2023–2024) and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Arts (2021). Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions and museums across the world, including the 14th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, the Aichi Triennale in Japan, Anchorage Museum in Alaska, Camden Art Centre in London, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Dia Art Foundation in New York, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ON.
In 2020, Lukin Linklater released the first edition of her book of poetry, Slow Scrape, which draws on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and Sugt’stun. Her writing has also appeared in publications like The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada (2023) and art catalogues like Mark: Sonya Kelliher-Combs (2024).
Throughout her career, Lukin Linklater has prioritized structuring and facilitating spaces for others to contribute. She has worked with BIPOC independent dance artists and visual artists and is interested in further developing the conceptual language that she shares with others in her performance practice. She continues to think about embodiment and weather, legacy, and the future generations of artists. Though Lukin Linklater moved to Edmonton, in 2026, living outside urban centres was an important part of her practice historically. “There’s a way in which I can gather people for a short period of time, whether that’s to make a video or undertake a performance in an exhibition, and so that has been an important part of my practice. Not living in a city, not having quick access to a whole team of people. I would say that is important conceptually, practically, and has affected many of my modes of making over time,” she says.
The next phases of Lukin Linklater’s practice are clarifying her choreographic voice and mentorship: “Clarifying . . . movement language as well as other kinds of language that are part of my choreographic practice,” she notes. She is interested in intergenerational transmission of knowledge, which is multidirectional. “That’s why I’m thinking about . . . bringing, convening, and gathering people who are interested in my practice, who are interested in my approaches, and who I can continue to make work with over longer periods of time. I’m interested in long-term relationships with places, with people, and with knowledge,” she says.