Tatiana Wills’ work has made its way onto the silver screen in Banksy’s street art documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop, been featured on street banners in New York City for The Joyce Theater, exhibited in galleries, and won a number of awards and editorial features in numerous major magazines. 

Any written biography, at some point, though, is bound to have omissions. The same is true of Tatiana Wills. These omissions, however, are not the marks of absence or time glazed over but evidence of life’s amorphous nature. It is hard to define Tatiana Wills because it is hard to define any life, and she has lived 10,000 lives. 

Born in 1969 in Washington D.C. and raised in Maryland, Wills’s early life was tumultuous. She roamed throughout her small town existence, watching farms turn into housing developments, disappointed that the things she was interested in were not materializing around her. She increasingly felt like a loner. In high school, she oscillated between presenting herself as someone who lived out in the sticks to a punk rockstar. She roleplayed different selves, pushing the limits of expression. She would often visit her mother’s twin sister, an artist in New York, and wander the museums and galleries. On tracing paper, she would follow the outlines and shadows of those who donned vintage Life Magazine issues as if she were in fact tracing other possibilities for herself. 

Wills contained a reservoir of artistic inclinations, but it wouldn’t be until the birth of her daughter that she found a channel through which to release them: photography. Wills, who grew up with no photographs of herself, began documenting her daughter with the intent of proving she could do better, that she could provide a kind of record of motherhood and childhood that she never had herself. Wills uses photography in its most literal sense, an instrument meant to capture a particular frame of reality with as little tricks as possible. 

Eventually, Wills followed her aunt to Los Angeles, a place that presented its aura of possibility. She worked for a notable entertainment agency as the director of photography. Increasingly disenchanted with the artifice of advertising and celebrity culture, she would moonlight around Los Angeles, taking atmospheric photographs of industrial buildings and structures devoid of human presence. This empty, automated nocturnal landscape would—surprisingly—provide the foundation of her current practice and more intimate gaze looking at people for who they are and who they want to be. Her work at the entertainment agency included guerilla marketing campaigns that reignited her longing to be a part of an art community that was in some ways freer in its vision. She left the agency and sought out trailblazers and rule breakers, which resulted in her photography book Heroes & Villains (ZERO+ Publishing), a collection of portraits that illuminates the personas of several important underground artists. 

Wills’ current practice focuses on professional dancers and choreographers, including her daughter, a ballerina. In fact, her daughter encouraged her to take up dancing in order to manage a health issue. After having felt abnormal for some time in her own body, Wills had to create her own normal through dance, an experience that expanded into her artistic vision. Wills looks at the dance world as another place of roleplay and rebirth. Her attention to the immediacy and intimacy of performers and how they choose to represent themselves when they are no longer in the context of performance is something that she has long pursued and has now sharpened to needlepoint. 

Wills’ artistic practice sheds categorization—in fact, she resists being labeled as a photographer—because she views the camera as a tool, not a destination. She also views her career as non-chronological, an unfinished braid. The one constant is her commitment to working with and elevating other creatives. At odds with how to present herself in the world, Wills looks at others to understand herself. 

When she is not in ballet class, she can be found most days in her studio in Santa Monica. 

—Colter Ruland