Sierra Arts Academy Art Instructor

A fourth generation Nevadan, Tia Flores is known for her culturally themed pyrographic calabaza sculptures that depict the vast beauty of the Nevada desert and its natural inhabitants. Her artwork has been featured on HGTV’s That’s Cleaver!, Voices of America, PBS ArtEffects, and published in a variety of books and magazines. Tia is one of a handful of female artists featured in the book, Women Artists of the Great Basin by Mary Lee Fulkerson.

As an educator, Tia was an elementary a visual arts teacher and taught high school art which included fine art, digital, graphic design and AP Studio Art. During this time, she created an integrated art curriculum, ArtSciMath to help her students with their spatial reasoning and problem solving skills. Tia has presented at regional and national educational conferences stressing the importance of arts education to stimulate critical and innovative thinking for all students.

In 2018, Tia to travel to Peru to work with a group of women in the remote Ayacucho river village deep in the Amazon jungle. This unique adventure provided Tia the opportunity to assist the women in creating a sustainable craft made from the natural materials of their environment to help support their family’s income and the village’s economy. Tia returned to the village in 2019 and again in March 2020. Art making has alway been a vital part of Tia’s life. The arts create unique opportunities and can take you places like the Amazon Rainforest to teach art to women in a remote river village.