TANYA SAFONOVA
The choreographer behind SafoTwerk — and the method thousands of women across the US have used to learn how to twerk from scratch, right from their living room. 9+ years teaching, judging international championships, and translating studio-grade technique into a self-paced course made for American beginners.
THE STORY
Tanya didn’t start twerk to chase a trend. She started because she noticed a gap: women coming into dance studios who wanted to feel powerful in their own bodies — and being handed choreography that demanded perfection before it gave permission. She decided to teach the opposite way: permission first, technique second.
Over the next nine years, that approach turned into a full teaching methodology — one that breaks twerk down into mechanical building blocks (knee timing, pelvic isolation, weight transfer) instead of asking students to "just feel it." It’s the same method that took her from local Kyiv classes to judging international championships in Madrid, Vilnius, and Warsaw.
In 2020 she founded TATA CREW, then the UA Twerk Championship — Ukraine’s first national twerk competition. She co-organized Improv Twerk Fest and UNI Twerk Camp, two of Eastern Europe’s largest annual twerk gatherings. Today she splits her time between presenting at international festivals, judging battles across Europe, and running the online twerk tutorial that brought her teaching to students who’ll never make it to a Kyiv studio.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
"Every body can twerk. The job isn’t to make you look like me — it’s to help you find your own movement, in a space where nobody is judging it. Once you stop performing and start moving, everything else falls into place."
— Tanya Safonova
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