Tamia Diaz

Tamia’s introduction to cameras came from her father, everywhere they went he had one with him, always taking slides. When she was 13, he handed it to her. She remembers the picture she took: a mushroom growing up through pine needles on the forest floor in California. When she was 15, her father died traumatically. She spent a few years emotionally lost in pain, with her need for vision slowly starting to develop.

In her later teen years, she began to learn the basics of the camera as a machine, as well as developing and printing. The camera she chose to use had no light meter, so she taught herself to see how 400-speed black-and-white film would react. She loved it, but the whole time she knew something was missing, like there was a piece of the puzzle that was just not there. It bothered her, and then it hit her. She was standing outside of the film office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She felt as though everything just moved around her, while she stood still in the middle of it, able to see far into the future. There was a feeling that she had found what was going to give her meaning for the rest of her life. At that moment, she knew what was missing in her still camera, what had been bothering her for so long, why she felt like something was missing in the pictures she took

Tamia came to loving making movies over the course of her life, reflected in her recent selection as one of the new directors of Women Behind The Camera!