About the Artist

Tahila C. Mintz is a Yaqui photographer, film maker and new media artist who has worked around the world to foster cultural understanding through these mediums. She predominantly creates within indigenous communities of the Americas, to give access to ancestral ways of being, to promote understandings between communities, and to help bring more peace between humans, and in their relationship to the earth. She has worked several years as a full time lecturer of photography at Central Texas College and at Texas State University. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin, a BA in Multicultural Communications from American University and studied a year at FAMU, the Czech national photography university while apprenticing with president Vaclav Havel official photographer, Karel Cudlín. She is a Make Art With Purpose fellow, a Puffin Foundation fellow, a Kathryn Davis Peace fellow, and has been a Pechakucha speaker along with other key speaking events. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She lives in the Seneca and Cayuga Territories. Tahila is currently the Director of Sustainable Indigenous Futures organization.

Artist's Statement

As an indigenous woman, my work focuses on engaging in paradigm shifting towards ancestral systems of matriarchy and gender equality, contemporary indigenous issues in a post-colonization culture, and the work of re-membering the strands of knowledge that have been unraveled by colonial interventions. I also create work surrounding the re-generation of relationships with the natural world. My intentions in creating photographs, collages, videos, and interactive pieces of/and in reference to indigenous peoples’ is to witness the truths, wisdom, struggles, medicines, life, death, community, traditions, post colonial shifts and acknowledge the peoples as we are, standing.

Out of respect, ceremony is not a place for photography.  Therefore in my Time Non Linear series I make abstract wet color photograms, utilizing alternative processes to express deeper investigations into ceremony. With drums pounding the rhythm of the heart beat and native voices high, I center into the pure darkness of my laboratory and use ceremonial objects to move with the energy of creation. Linear time for us is a learned system. For our tribes, time is in relation to space and is cyclical. Based in space, we orient to the world through the four directions, above and below.

Click here to download the Profile Package for Tahila Corwin Mintz.

Artworks by Tahila Corwin Mintz are included in the following Camiba Gallery exhibits:

INSIGHT: CAMIBAart Artists’ Perspectives on 2020

Staying Home - April 2020

Tahila Xicahuamazatl Mintz: SPOKEN - December 2016

Truly: Imagined – December 2015

CAMIBAart Gallery Artists – November 2015

Cycles of Life – May 2015