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 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. She is currently working on a project on Blackness and the Mississippi River as well as a photographic/writing project with her mother that addresses questions of biopolitics, Black memory and indigeneity by looking at the houses that the women in her family lived in the post-bellum South.