Tania Cañas is an artist-researcher based on unceded Kulin Territory. Her practice looks at the relationship between ‘art making’ and ‘community making’ in the context of community- led methodologies at the intersection of performance, decoloniality, borders and displacement.
Her socially engaged practice creates dynamic community-led creative platforms as sites of collaboration, modalities of resistance as well as ways to rethink processes and re-cast institutions. Tania's unique practice develops creative processes that foreground voices as authors of their collective experience, actively reshaping the conditions of creative possibility within communities-rather than treating communities as sources of data for academic commentary.
She is the artistic director at Arts Gen, a community arts and health organisation, and leads the Performance and Community Engagement as well as the Social Practice courses at the Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2021.
Image 1: ‘ten things to consider’, 2016.
Image 2 & 3: “Unwelcome Mats”, 2015.
