Tanya Tagaq Gillis (BFA) (sometimes credited as Tagaq) is an Inuit throat singer from Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktuutiak), Nunavut, Canada, on the south coast of Victoria Island. After attending school in Cambridge Bay she went, at age 15, to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories to attend high school where she first began to practice throat singing. She later studied visual arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and while there developed her own solo form of Inuit throat singing, which is normally done by two women.
Although she has become a popular performer at Canadian folk festivals, such as Folk on the Rocks in 2005, she is best known both in Canada and internationally for her collaborations with Björk, including concert tours and the 2004 album Medúlla. She has also performed with the Kronos Quartet and Shooglenifty and featured on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.
In 2005, her CD entitled Sinaa (Inuktitut for "edge") was nominated for five awards at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards. At the ceremony on 25 October 2005, the CD won awards for Best Producer/Engineer, Best Album Design and Tagaq herself won the Best Female Artist award.
Sinaa was nominated for the 2006 Juno Awards as the Best Aboriginal Recording.
According to her official page, her music is like that of Björk in that Tagaq makes music that is both decidedly unusual and universally appealing on a basic level. Her innovative, solo style of throat singing seeks to push the boundaries of emotion and to express the primitive instincts she believes still reside deep within our flesh. She describes her evolution over the past six years as a process of going deeper and deeper into her performance to the point where she virtually “leaves her body” and lets the expression take over.
Although primarily known for her throat singing, she is also an accomplished artist and her work was featured on the 2003 Northwestel telephone directory.
Her most recent album, Auk/Blood (ᐊᐅᒃ Inuktitut syllabics) features collaborations with Mike Patton, among others.
This entry is from 
© MMIX