Tatiana Donaldson

Las Vegas-born writer, visual documentarian, and photographer. Working on 35mm and medium format film — documenting architecture, place, and the stories embedded inside built environments. Born and raised in Las Vegas. Available globally.

There are certain spaces that stay with you — long before you ever step inside them. I've always been drawn to that feeling. The way light moves through a room. The way a place can hold both stillness and movement at the same time. That attention — to space, to presence, to what a room asks of you — is where my work begins.

I was born and raised in Las Vegas. I spent nearly a decade in New York City, where I worked in fashion and editorial beauty — years that trained me to pay close attention to light, to presence, and to the way people occupy a space. I lived in Cambodia. I traveled. I wrote. When I returned to Las Vegas and became a mother, something clarified. Photography became another language for what I had already been doing through writing. The tools changed. The mission never did.

I'm a writer and visual documentarian exploring space, presence, and intentional living through architecture, travel, and motherhood. My work lives at the intersection of design and experience — documenting not only what a space looks like, but how it feels to move through it.

I am a mother raising my son Azulu, who is two years old. He is with me almost every time I shoot. He has stood in front of monuments, wandered through architectural spaces, and been the small barefoot figure in the frame that makes the scale of everything else legible. The practice of motherhood and the practice of seeing are the same practice. I have stopped treating them as competing priorities.

I shoot on film — primarily a Minolta SRT-101 for 35mm and a Mamiya RB67 Professional for medium format. Film slows the decision. It makes the frame deliberate. Every image is a commitment. Over time, documenting like this — moving slowly, observing closely, allowing a space to unfold — has become a practice in itself. A return to myself. A way of integrating all the parts of my life that matter most.

I'm drawn to spaces that feel intentional. Spaces that invite you to slow down. Spaces that reveal themselves over time. Through image and story, I document the quiet beauty within them — paying attention to the details that might otherwise go unnoticed. This work is a living archive of where I've been, what I've seen, and how I'm learning to be present within it all.

Before this photographic chapter, I founded Ambitious Black Girl — a platform for Black women creatives. That work taught me something essential: documentation is an act of convening. It decides what gets preserved and who gets to be seen. I carried that forward.

Born and raised in Las Vegas. Often traveling between cities and countries. Available globally.