Tabitha Soren

Tabitha Soren (born August 19, 1967) is an American photographer, visual artist and former television journalist. She began her career in broadcast journalism, working for MTV News, CNN, ABC News and NBC News, before moving into fine-art photography. Her photographic work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally and is held in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Early life and journalism

Soren was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1967. She graduated from New York University in 1989 with a degree in journalism and politics.

Soren began working in television news in the late 1980s. During her early career she worked at CNN, where she performed production and reporting duties, before joining MTV. A 1993 profile in the Los Angeles Times described her work at MTV as including reporting, writing, producing and editing.

At MTV News, Soren became particularly associated with political reporting aimed at younger audiences. She was a prominent participant in MTV's Choose or Lose campaign during the 1992 United States presidential election, interviewing political figures and reporting on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. The campaign received a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism in 1993.

During her fellowship, Soren shifted her visual practice from television production toward still photography. She has described the change as moving from working with approximately 30 video frames per second to making individual photographic frames.

Soren has said that photography allowed her to explore emotional and psychological subjects in ways that differed from the demands of television journalism. Her subsequent work has frequently examined the relationship between psychology, culture, politics, the body and photographic representation.

Photography

Soren's photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, New York, McSweeney's, The New Yorker and other publications.

Her photographic projects have included Running, Fantasy Life, Panic Beach, Surface Tension, Uprooted, Relief, Weathering and Motherload.

Panic Beach

Panic Beach is a photographic series centred on large waves and coastlines. The project forms part of Soren's broader interest in photographing forces and environments that place people in situations of uncertainty and vulnerability.

The resulting photographs juxtapose the physical marks left by human contact with the digital images displayed on the screen. The Cleveland Museum of Art described the project as examining the marks left on glass screens and the relationship between physical movement and mediated digital experience.

Surface Tension was Soren's first solo museum exhibition. It debuted at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College before travelling to the Transformer Station in Cleveland.

In May 2021, their daughter Dixie Lewis, aged 19, was killed in a head-on collision near Truckee, California.

Soren lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.