Tanya Shewfelt
Tanya has spent over two decades delivering communication results in the airline, oil and gas, health and safety, and non-profit sectors, devoted to finding ways to connect and engage with audiences by infusing the power of storytelling with the accessibility of digital media. It has been Tanya’s job to translate content into visual forms by combining digital elements within a narrative structure. Using technology as a creative partner to produce engaging content for digital platforms such as video, web, and interactive documentary, with story being at the heartbeat of every creative endeavour.
During Tanya’s Master of Arts degree at Royal Roads, she witnessed that research can be a catalyst for social change. She used an arts-based method of documentary storytelling for her research on domestic violence, with storytelling as the central medium of knowledge transmission. Creating a documentary allowed Tanya to uncover the complexities of victim blaming in domestic violence as the essence of the human experience would have been difficult to capture in a standard scholarly article. Storytelling triggered a deeper reflection and stimulated learning on the social problem of victim blaming in domestic violence.
This passion for public scholarship was behind Tanya’s decision to found Visceral Data, a digital storytelling studio specializing in transforming social science research into digital storytelling platforms. Visceral Data moves research from the research journal and academic conferences to a public audience by translating knowledge and experience into multimedia spaces to help tackle the pressing issues of the day.
