The team behind Spiritual Cabaret.

Tanya Besedina is a Latvian Ukrainian Canadian artist based in Toronto whose work explores fragility, memory, rupture, and transformation through porcelain sculptures, installations, and immersive environments. Working primarily with translucent porcelain alongside salvaged and timeworn materials, she creates sensory spaces that balance delicacy and tension, intimacy and exposure, beauty and unease.

Originally trained in fashion design and later completing an MBA in Ukraine, Besedina’s practice moves between material research, artistic production, and cultural organizing. Her work is shaped by migration, motherhood, ritual, touch, and the emotional traces carried by objects over time. Recurring forms such as vessels, shells, branches, eyes, and organic growths appear throughout her installations, creating environments that feel both psychologically charged and physically intimate.

Alongside her studio practice, Besedina has spent years researching porcelain and Parian materials, focusing on translucency, firing behavior, structural limits, and the sensory potential of ceramic surfaces. Her ongoing research has included mentorship through Ferrin Contemporary and research opportunities with the Chipstone Foundation, Winterthur Museum, and Bennington Museum.

Her work has been exhibited across North America, including Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, the Artist Project, the Dufferin Museum, and the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, where she has exhibited for more than a decade. In 2025, she received the Craft Ontario Helen Copeland Memorial Award in Ceramics and won the international Made with Laguna competition.

Besedina has received longstanding support from the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto, York Region Arts Council, Craft Ontario, and other public and private arts funding programs for exhibitions, installations, research, education, and interdisciplinary initiatives.

Alongside her exhibitions, she has led tactile workshops with CNIB, participated in artist talks and school programs, and developed public projects centered on material experience, accessibility, and sensory engagement.

As cofounder and organizational lead of Spiritual Cabaret Lab, Besedina develops workshops, installations, gatherings, and public programming that connect contemporary art, ritual, philosophy, sound, and embodied experience. Her work within the collective focuses on building sustainable frameworks for interdisciplinary practice, collaboration, and public participation.

Sofya Voronko is a Russian-Canadian performer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and educator. Her art lies at the intersection of music, theatre, and community work. With a background in classical music and musical theatre, she creates immersive performances that integrate voice, movement, and instrumental music, with audience participation as a defining feature.

Sofya draws on folk, pop-rock, cabaret, and musical theatre. Working in English and Russian, her songwriting balances intuition and intellect: lyrics unfold with the ease of natural speech, while her themes are grounded in careful research.

Sofya is the founder of multiple community-driven initiatives, including Sol Multicultural Music Festival and La-La-Larks intergenerational choir. Collaboration is central to her creative process. Her current project, Spiritual Cabaret (in development), is a multidisciplinary performance created in collaboration with porcelain artist Tanya Besedina, blending original music, visual art, and community-based performance.

Kiril Nagornyj is a researcher, lecturer, and art historian whose work moves between science, music, and visual culture. Born into a family of art collectors, he was surrounded from an early age by painting, antiques, porcelain, and music, shaping a lifelong engagement with art and cultural history.

Originally trained as a nuclear physicist, he continued his independent study of art, music, symbolism, philosophy, and historical interpretation while building a career in technology and digital systems.

His research focuses on museum culture, symbolism in painting and porcelain, and the relationship between scientific thinking and artistic perception. Through lectures and educational programs, he explores the historical, philosophical, and spiritual ideas embedded within works of art and material objects.

He has presented talks for Toronto audiences on subjects including Hieronymus Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights, the relationship between music and mathematics, suppressed histories, and the evolving definition of art.

At Spiritual Cabaret, Kiril leads research and public education initiatives, developing programs that bring people together through art, music, history, and open discussion. His work is rooted in the belief that culture should remain a living part of community life, shared across generations, disciplines, and backgrounds.

I came to the arts the long way. Through engineering, industrial systems, and years of building digital infrastructure for organizations across different industries and cultures.

My background is technical. But the questions that have always interested me most are human ones: how do people connect, how do communities form, and what happens when technology gets out of the way and lets something real occur between people.

I speak Russian, Hebrew, and English. I carry Ukrainian and Jewish roots. I have spent my life working across cultures, disciplines, and contexts, and I have learned that the most interesting things happen at the edges, where different worlds meet and have to find a common language.

That is what drew me to Spiritual Cabaret. Not the technology they needed, but the questions they are asking. How does art reach people who don’t think of themselves as an audience? How does a community become part of something rather than just witness to it?

As Creative Technologist, I build the digital infrastructure that makes Spiritual Cabaret’s work visible and accessible, and I develop interactive systems that invite communities to participate in art rather than simply observe it.

Research is part of how we work here, and so is educating and sharing. Whatever we learn, whatever we know, we bring back to the artists in our community.

I believe the best technology leaves no trace. Only the human moment remains.