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 went on to write and perform the original shows “Pregnant Pause” and “A Woman’s Work…” to critical and commercial acclaim.

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 seventy shows in the last 10 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)

She teaches solo performance and writing workshops to people who want to create their own one person shows. She has directed numerous one person shows including “Girl Facing West” with Susana Guillaume, “Sole Survivors” with Michelle Vest, “Even if the Mountains Burn” with James Koskinas, “Maternal Dreamer” with Ramona King, ‘ Other Arrangements” with Maida Rogerson and many more.

Tanya continues to live and work in New Mexico where students come to work with her on their one person shows and memoirs from all over the world.