Tanya Lukin Linklater makes dances in museums, videos, sculptures, and works on paper. She thinks with weather, embodiment, and beingness in her practice. Sensation, scores, orality, poetics, embodied inquiry, and being in relation to ancestral belongings and other material structure her work. Through citation of Indigenous peoples' lived experience and cultural work, she honours practices and lineages that exceed dominant ideas of who we are. Her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. She continues to write in relation to what she has come to call felt structures.

Her exhibitions and performances in recent years include the 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Aichi Triennale, Japan; Anchorage Museum, Alaska; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Camden Art Centre, London; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Dia Art Foundation, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; New Museum Triennial, New York; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Toronto Biennial of Art; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia.

Crested, a solo exhibition of textiles, bentwood sculptures, watercolours, and open rehearsals, was presented by Portikus in Frankfurt in summer 2026. Curated by Juliane Bischoff, Crested is Tanya Lukin Linklater's first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Crested will join Duane Linklater's mâcistan at Rudolfinum in Prague, Czechia in fall/winter 2026. 

Tendon thread, a LAB performance commission, will be presented by the Fisher Center at Bard and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts in winter 2026. "19th century Sugpiaq belongings (commonly called artifacts) that originate from Kodiak, Alaska have been held in a museum collection in Russia for a century or more. Imagining that they yearn for Sugpiaq homelands, Tendon thread is an embodied, sounded meditation on dispossession and repair felt in this moment." 

Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by weather), including works from the last ten years and new commissions, and curated by Kelly Kivland, was presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2024. The exhibition included open rehearsals near sculptures and a gathering to mark its completion.

Released in spring 2024, My mind is with the weather documents Lukin Linklater's iterative exhibitions at the the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Oakville Galleries; and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin. Edited by Frances Loeffler, the book includes contributions by Eungie Joo, Layli Long Soldier, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Beth Piatote.

Her book, Slow Scrape (2nd edition, Talonbooks, Vancouver 2022), draws on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and can be read alongside her practice of choreography. Her recent publications include poetry and art writing on Ruth Cuthand, Tsema Igharas, Sonya Kelliher-Combs and Taqralik Partridge. 

She has worked alongside dance artists Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Sam Aros-Mitchell, Mya Dixon, Talia Dixon, Ceinwen Gobert, Jonathan Gonzalez, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Emily Law, and Brandi Norton, among others. She is a member of the collective Grey Plumes with Duane Linklater.

Tanya received 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).

She studied at Stanford University (A.B. Honours) and University of Alberta (M.Ed.). Completing her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in 2023, her doctoral writing emphasized weather, embodiment, and materiality while theorizing Indigenous performance. In 2024 she undertook a post-doctoral fellowship in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices with Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Canada Excellence Research Chair at University of Victoria.

In 2024 Tanya curated Suarluni / Emergence: Circumpolar Performance with stunning performances by Inuit women artists for ᕿᓐᓂᕋᔮᑦᑐᖅ Qinnirajaattuq / Ripples: Making Waves in Inuit Art symposium in Montréal.

Tanya taught as a faculty mentor in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ (Santa Fe) low-residency MFA in Studio Arts 2021-2026 and was invited faculty at The Banff Centre’s spring visual arts residency program in 2023. Her practice has been supported by Inuit Art Foundation, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts.

Her Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago.