Tiffany Ayalik is a multidisciplinary artist from Yellowknife, NT, whose work focuses on storytelling through the mediums of performance, music and filmmaking. It was in the North, listening to stories from her elders, where Ayalik discovered her love of storytelling and the powerful change that hearing a story can bring about.
After receiving her Diploma in Acting from Red Deer College, she continued her studies at the University of Alberta, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting. Her theatre credits include Zhaboonigan in The Rez Sisters (The Belfry Theatre), Sedna in The Legend of Sedna (BAM Collective) and Bobby in The Big League (Manitoba Theatre for Young People), among others, and she sang as a cultural representative for the Northwest Territories at the 2010 Olympics. She has travelled across Canada and performed in Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finland and in Europe.
As a woman with many talents, Ayalik is a host for a TV series called Wild Kitchen, where she meets interesting people who are closely connected to the land and the food they harvest. “Wild Kitchen” is enjoyed across the North and in 47 million homes in the US on the First Nations’ Experience Network. Ayalik’s film work can be found at film festivals internationally; she played Daphne in CBC’s A Christmas Fury, the spinoff of cult-classic Little Dog and was a iusical sketch writer for Mary Walsh’s touring comedy show Canad: It’s Complicated among other writing credits for film, TV and theatre. She has produced multiple films through her production company Copper Quartz Media, most recently completing the short Okpik: Little Village in the Arctic (2022) for CBC.
Ayalik also lends her vocal talents to the musical duo PIQSIQ with her sister Kayley Inuksuk Mackay. PIQSIQ is an Inuit style throat singing duo that performs ancient traditional songs and eerie new compositions. Both sisters and Grayson Gritt are also members of the Juno Award winning Quantum Tangle, whose album Tiny Hands won Indigenous Album of the Year in 2017. When she isn’t touring, performing or composing, Ayalik is a guest faculty member at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where she works with musicians, dancers and storytellers.