Tamara W. Hill is a jewelry designer and a professional photographer, who has had a varied career as a teacher and lecturer, art critic, author of three published books and many magazine articles, curator of costume and textile exhibitions, and collector of handicrafts and folk art.

Originally from the East Coast, she has traveled extensively throughout the world and resides in San Francisco. Trained from childhood in drawing and painting, Tamara studied at the Art Students League in New York; attended Smith and Sarah Lawrence Colleges (B.A.); and received an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, N.Y.U; followed by Ph.D. studies at the Graduate Theological Union and U.C. Berkeley. She has been a long-time practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, and is well versed in its meditation practices and cultural background.

For more than thirty years, Ms. Hill has taught art history, comparative religion and symbolism at colleges, art schools, museums, conferences, societies and organizations; including study groups and seminars at the Asian Art Museum, S.F., specializing in Buddhist symbolism and the arts of the Himalayas. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1973. In 1982 she served as a lecturer on a museum-sponsored tour to Tibet and China; and in 1985 again lectured for a tour to Tibet and Mt. Everest; while there, she photographed long-hidden treasures of sacred art. Her photographs have been displayed in the Tibetan exhibition galleries at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, with a mural image of the bejeweled “Jo Rinpoche” (Crowned Sakyamuni Buddha) the most significant statue from the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa. She has been designing jewelry throughout her multi-faceted career.

Tamara’s jewelry designs have been featured at the Asian Art Museum Store, the Rubin Museum of Tibetan Art (N.Y.C) and at fine galleries and boutiques in San Francisco (The Rafael’s, F. Dorian Gallery, Virginia Breier Contemporary Crafts), Carmel (Concepts), Sonoma (Artifax), and Santa Fe (Karen Melfi Collection).

Her images have been reproduced in numerous periodicals, books, catalogues and films. Since 2000, archival prints of her color photographs have been featured in exhibitions both locally and nationally.