🐐 About Me

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist learner. Her hybrid practice enacts the Black geographic, long histories - some documented, some not -between black folks and the fabricated environment. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama and received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She was awarded a number of fellowships including a recent Smithsonian Artist Fellowship in 2020. In 2018, Gardner received a Phd in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota where she completed a practice-based dissertation on Black folks, mobility and the history of small (now tiny) house practices, titled: 'Sensing Place: HouseScale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City.' . She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and a 2024 NYFA, Anonymous Was a Woman Grantee and she's currently working on a project about Fairfield, her elders, and the geologic time that made her home(town) a profitable racial landscape for the US Steel. Alongside this work, she continues to teach and develop projects related to rivers, particularly, the Mississippi River, and maritime history through her work on a series of floating camera obscuras, developing a practice of social photography.