ABOUT THE STUDIO

Tanaïs is a New York City based author and perfumer. Their book In Sensorium: Notes For My People, won the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. This genre-defying book offers a necessary, alternative feminist perspective of South Asian history through the lens of scent and sensuality. Holding complex, discordant histories is central to their artistic practice. Adornment is a sensuous act of resistance. Liberation is the ultimate goal.

Everything Tanaïs creates is laced with a desire that all beings feel their innate beauty.

They are the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Bright Lines, Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and The Brooklyn Public Library Prize. and their forthcoming feminist futurist novel, Stellar Smoke will be published by Dutton Books in 2025.

As a self-taught perfumer, they work with a library of hundreds of rare botanicals, attars, and fine perfumer's raw materials.

Tanaïs' perfumes are opulent, original works of art.

Photograph by Abigail Tulenko

Their inspirations are rooted in their Bangladeshi heritage, the wild beauty of their home, New York City, and their spiritual homes, India, Hawaii, Bali, Mexico, Morocco, the Mojave Desert, Jamaica, psychedelia, sensuous resistance, the non-duality of masc-femme, Afro-futurism, Black liberation and feminist thought, Bollywood disco, Rekha, their Bengali foremothers, The Buddha, Sufism, queer ecstasy, trans divinity, fluidity, textiles, beads, narcotic flowers, celestial bodies, Venus and the Moon, meditations by bodies of water, walking in the woods, where places where the ancient and future become one, dance, film, music on vinyl, nature, the cosmos and the Divine, as imagined by syncretic South Asian olfactory and spiritual traditions for eons.

"Tanaïs, the name I have given myself, is a portmanteau of the first two letters of my three names, Tanwi Nandini Islam. There is no splitting me apart. This renaming liberates me from patrilineage, gender and religion in a single utterance. Tanaïs holds my Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist lineages in a single breath."