Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Her creative and scholarly practice are interested interdisciplinary strategies and engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner grows up in Fairfield, Alabama, across the street from Birmingham 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. Gardner 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 has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her current work as brings together the Black geographic with questions of geology to examine race and landscape particularly along the Mississippi River and surround her hometown in Fairfield/Birmingham.

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Tia-Simone currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.