These days, Tamara works almost full-time as an artist in her Gowanus, Brooklyn studio. She says, “It’s no exaggeration that I often pinch myself when I walk through the studio door in the morning.” It's taken some time to get to this point, and she thoroughly appreciates, even revels in the situation in which she now finds herself.

She graduated with a BFA in painting from Syracuse University in 1976, earned an MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and then moved to New York in 1980. After juggling part-time jobs and maintaining a small studio for a few years, she decided to join up with some super-creative designer-friends she’d met while at Syracuse. They went on to co-found Smart Design, the renowned, award-winning consumer product design firm with some 100 employees and offices in New York, San Francisco and Barcelona. Smart is best known for its Oxo “Good Grips” kitchen gadgets which can be found in both Target and the MoMA Design Collection. Although it was an exciting and fun place, and she learned lots, Tamara left Smart Design to concentrate on her own artwork in 1999.

She began using a wide range of materials and methods, from fabric and crochet wall pieces to a hard shell gourd-garden installation piece called Outta My Gourd. Then, an interest in historical architecture that had been long dormant began to take hold—first, in a series of paintings of pre-war commercial buildings in Long Island City, Around the Corner, then in an installation piece built around imagery of interior spaces found in an 1850’s octagon house in upstate New York, A Ruched Life. The most recent, Chambers, large-scale watercolors drawn from rooms in a Colonial mansion in Philadelphia, has turned out to be a deep vein of ideas, one that continues to surprise and motivate.

Tamara makes her home in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, with her husband, John, a Labrador retriever, Lucy, and a Chinese pug, Arantxa.