TIKA is a Canadian Academy Award–winning interdisciplinary artist, composer, immersive world-builder, cultural futurist, and emotional technology practitioner whose work explores the intersection of sound, storytelling, nervous system literacy, speculative imagination, and human-centered systems design.

Working across immersive installation, film composition, screenwriting, facilitation, public speaking, and interdisciplinary research-creation, she creates emotionally resonant experiences that investigate how softness, memory, imagination, atmosphere, and emerging technologies can function as tools for collective healing, cultural repair, and imaginative sovereignty.

Her work centers Black speculative imagination, diasporic memory, participatory storytelling, and restorative world-building, creating spaces where individuals and communities can reconnect with themselves, one another, and the futures they deserve to imagine.

TIKA is the Founder and CEO of Iverna Island™, a multidisciplinary cultural ecosystem devoted to storytelling, emotional literacy, creative sovereignty, and restorative practice through immersive arts programming, facilitation, sound, and community-centered cultural design. Her methodologies integrate somatic awareness, trauma-informed facilitation, Black diasporic sonic lineage, speculative world-building, and emotional technology frameworks that position sound, atmosphere, memory, and embodiment as powerful tools for learning, leadership, care, and transformation.

In 2022, TIKA received the Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Song for Learn to Swim, co-written with Casey MQ. She is an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre's Slaight Family Music Residency and has composed for feature films, documentaries, and interdisciplinary narrative projects. As a recording artist, her critically acclaimed work has been recognized for its cinematic emotional depth, atmospheric sonic language, and intimate storytelling. She has shared stages with artists including John Legend and NAO.

Internationally, TIKA is a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and interdisciplinary artist whose keynotes, workshops, and public engagements explore emotional technology, creative sovereignty, nervous system literacy, restorative cultural design, and Black speculative futures. Her signature frameworks—including Rest As Resistance™, The Cost of Silence™, Creative Sovereignty™, Sound, Sovereignty & Access™, and The Nervous System Knows First™—have been presented across artistic, academic, corporate, and community contexts in Canada and internationally.

Her recent work has been presented at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and universities and conferences across Canada, Ireland, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. She is currently completing an MBA in Arts Innovation through the Global Leaders Institute, where her work focuses on cultural infrastructure, systems thinking, interdisciplinary leadership, and sustainable creative ecosystems.

Her current immersive installation project, Dreams We Were Never Given: A Black Atmospheric Mythology, explores AI-assisted speculative world-building, sonic restoration, participatory memory-making, and emotionally restorative fantasy environments centered on Black imagination beyond systems of survival, exclusion, and historical absence.

Whether composing for screen, designing immersive installations, facilitating collective reflection, or building emotionally intelligent cultural ecosystems, TIKA invites audiences into spaces of wonder, emotional presence, belonging, and possibility—reminding us that the most advanced technologies are still profoundly human.