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 Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Iceland, Norway, Finland and in Europe.
As a woman with many talents, Ayalik was a host for the TV series called Wild Kitchen, where she met 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 musical sketch writer for Mary Walsh’s touring comedy show Canada: It’s Complicated among other writing credits for film, TV and theatre. She has produced multiple films through her production company Copper Quartz Media, including the feature documentary Okpik: Little Village in the Arctic (2022) for CBC, which she co-directed with Kylik Kisoun Taylor.
Ayalik also lends her vocal talents to the musical duo PIQSIQ with her sister Inuksuk Mackay. PIQSIQ is a katajjaq (Inuit throat singing) duo that performs ancient traditional songs and eerie new compositions. Both sisters and G.R. Gritt were also members of the Juno Award winning former band 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.