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About Project Life Stories
Tanya Taylor Rubinstein
Tanya Taylor Rubinstein is the founder and Artistic Director of Project Life Stories, an organization based in Santa Fe,NM devoted to “Stories of the Soul”.
Classically trained as an actor at Carnegie- Mellon University, Emerson College and H.B. Studios (with the late, great Bill Hickey) Tanya was catapulted onto her own spiritual journey unexpectedly and dramatically in 1990 when several close friends in her community of Greenwich Village died of AIDS. At the age of 26, with $2,000 to her name and a beat up old Buick that her mom had given her (named “Buela”), she left all her possessions (except for clothes and books) in front of a storage unit on 125th Street and set out for Santa Fe, a place that she had never been to and where she knew no-one.
In grief, and experiencing the exasperation of being sent out on cattle calls by sleazy agents( yes, the cliché’s can be true) she dumped her headshots in a garbage can and vowed that she was finished with acting. What she didn’t know at the time was that what she was finished with was the competitive and soul stealing paradigm of commercial acting and about to embark on the deepest creative journey her life.
In college she had seen the amazing Spalding Gray perform and had harbored a profound and secret desire to write and perform a one person show. But, she wasn’t trained as a writer and didn’t know where to begin. The landscapes in the strange and foreign land (to her) of New Mexico opened her heart and mind. She got a job waiting tables, floated in the lake in Bisque beneath a great rust colored mesa and began to create her life anew.
She picked up Natalie Goldberg’s book, “Writing Down the Bones” and Julia Cameron’s “The Artists Way”(both based in Taos, Nm). She spent three years teaching herself how to write and low and behold, she wrote a one woman show.
“Honeymoon in India” was written, performed and produced by Tanya at the Railyard Performance Space in Santa Fe. It was Tanya’s first show and was voted “Top 10 Shows of the Year” in 1996 by the Santa Fe Reporter.
Tanya wrote and performed several other shows and, in 2000, began to teach the process of writing and performing autobiographical monologues to other people. She created the Transformational Monologue Process for “regular people” dealing with challenging circumstances to write and perform their stories onstage.
Her group monologue shows have become a phenomena, and she has facilitated and created over fifty shows in the last seven years including “The Cancer Monologues” (Santa Fe, NYC, Boston, Chicago), The AIDS Monologues, Core Witness (Monologues from Veterans for Peace), The Soul of Peace (Israeli and Palestinian Teens), The Soul of Living and Dying: Caregiver Monologues (LA, San Diego, Dallas), The Soul of Aging (with Elders), Gender Bender (Gay and Lesbian Voices), Mothering: The Monologues (with Mothering Magazine) and many more.
She is the co-editor of The Cancer Monologue Project (MacAdam Cage) and the upcoming “Soul of a Dog” and “Soul of an Emerging World”.
She teaches solo performance and writing workshops to people who want to create their own one person shows. In 2007 she has directed two full length one woman shows, “Girl Facing West” with Susana Guillaume and “Sole Survivors” with Michelle Vest.
Her life is enormously blessed through her path of “storytelling” and “storygathering.” It is also blessed beyond measure by her husband Donald Rubinstein, astounding daughter, Chloe Grace and their two bulldogs, Rex and Libby~ the family jewels!
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