TIKA

Artist · Cultural Futurist · Emotional Technology Practitioner

TIKA is a Canadian Screen Award–winning composer, cultural futurist, and emotional technology practitioner whose work bridges sound, healing, and human-centered systems innovation. Operating at the intersection of music, nervous system literacy, spiritual intelligence, and decolonial design, she is recognized for transforming lived experience into emotionally resonant frameworks that support both individual regulation and collective liberation.

She is the founder of Iverna Island™, a cultural infrastructure and creative-wellbeing ecosystem dedicated to supporting intersectional creators through sound, story, and embodied practice. Through this work, TIKA develops methodologies that integrate somatic awareness, creative sovereignty, Black diasporic sonic lineage, and trauma-informed design, positioning sound and embodiment as sophisticated technologies for learning, leadership, and care.

TIKA holds an MBA in Arts Innovation from the Global Leaders Institute, where her work focuses on systems thinking, cultural infrastructure, and sustainable creative ecosystems. She brings a rare fluency across artistic practice, strategic design, and emerging technology, informed in part by her early participation in Web3 music platforms. During the beta phase of decentralized creative technologies, she explored new models of ownership, access, and monetization, gaining firsthand insight into both the liberatory potential and psychological cost of immersive digital systems.

In 2022, TIKA received the Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Song for Learn to Swim, co-written with Casey MQ. An alumna of the Canadian Film Centre, she has composed for feature films, documentaries, and series, including the acclaimed project Ninety-Two, weaving ancestral memory, emotional precision, and spiritual technology into narrative sound worlds.

As a recording artist, her album Anywhere But Here was praised as a cinematic meditation on grief, healing, and return. She has shared stages with artists such as John Legend and NAO, offering a vocal and sonic language defined by intimacy, clarity, and resonance.

Internationally, TIKA is a sought-after speaker and facilitator on emotional technology, creative sovereignty, cultural healing, and accessible futures. Her signature frameworks — Sound, Sovereignty & Access™, Beyond Notation™, The Sonic Afterlife™, Nervous System Literacy for Creatives™, and The Cost of Silence™ — are used across artistic, academic, corporate, and community contexts.

Through partnerships with institutions including the University of Toronto, Project Agape, Future Black Female, and global arts and innovation programs, TIKA continues to build pathways that center care, dignity, and human presence in the design of future systems.

Her forthcoming work, The Frequency of Love (2027), is an experiential offering exploring nervous system restoration, emotional alignment, and love as a radical, embodied practice.

Whether composing for screen, guiding keynotes, facilitating deep listening spaces, or designing cultural infrastructure, TIKA’s work invites a return to center — reminding us that the most advanced technologies are still human.