Tiffany Shlain Shares the Eight Ingredients to Live as a Working Artist

by MY HERO Media from LAGUNA BEACH, CA

CONTACT: Jeanne Meyers FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Co-founder/Director
The MY HERO Project
[email protected]

JUNE 15, 2026 — LAGUNA BEACH, CA

174810 Tiffany Shlain stands beside her new work Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring.Tiffany Shlain, with permission

The Eva Haller Salon Series welcomed long-time friend of MY HERO Tiffany Shlain on Saturday to discuss her extraordinary career as an interdisciplinary artist. In a highly visual talk Shlain reflected on her journey and the lessons she has carried with her over the years and shared the eight ingredients essential to any creative.

As one of the co-creators of the Webby Awards, Shlain was one of the first to clock the endless possibilities afforded to us by the internet. “I was thinking of computers as this way to connect people and ideas before the web existed,” she said on Saturday. George Shlain, Tiffany’s grandfather, moved to the states from Odessa, Ukraine, to escape the Holocaust. Only after years of sending money back to Odessa for his family did he learn that they had been killed. Years later when Tiffany began the search for any surviving family members, she used the web. She explained:

A lot of people know me because of the Webby Awards. I was so into the web because I was trying to find my roots and connect to the place that my grandfather was from.

Shlain detailed her journey as an artist, from working three jobs to afford her first film to creating Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness, a short created for Planned Parenthood which made it into the world-renowned Sundance Festival. Having her work acknowledged by such a giant in the film industry not only solidified the confidence instilled in her by her parents but spurned her on creatively. On the importance of such platforms, Shlain shared:

Awards programs like MY HERO or The Webbys are so important because they acknowledge people’s hard work and say, “You did a really good job.”

Shlain’s most recent project, Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring, is a 250-year-old sculpture that reimagines the traditional tree ring as a timeline tracing the history of women and power in society. Having seen the history tree ring timeline positioned at the entrance of Muir Woods, Shlain was astonished to see there were no women on the ring. “I was like Gosh, there’s not one woman on that timeline. I need to fix that. I need to make a feminist history tree ring,” said Shalin, “It hit me like a bolt of lightning.”

Crafted from reclaimed deodar cedar, Shlain’s piece distills 50,000 years of feminist history into 32 pivotal moments, each burned into the wood through pyrography. This traveling monument has appeared in Washington, DC, Madison Square Park in New York City, St. Louis, and San Francisco, and is now on view at the National Women's Hall of Fame.

To see Tiffany Shlain’s inspiring salon and discover her eight ingredients essential to live life as a working artist, click here.