Tatiana Shabelnik

Tatiana Shabelnik was born in Minsk, Belarus, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Love for art came very early in her life. She started drawing and painting at the age of 6, by designing outfits for her paper dolls. Her dolls were not her only “clients.” She also sketched outfits for herself. Her mother, Ludmila, a physicist, had also learned to sew so that she could make clothes for her daughter. As Ludmila says: “I was always puzzled by how to implement the ideas that my child put on paper.” Growing up, Tatiana enjoyed burda style fashion magazines, and by the age of 15, knew she wanted to be a designer. With a burning desire to see the West, Tatiana earned a scholarship for graduate studies in the United States, and earned her master’s degree in library and Information science at Louisiana State University. As a student at LSU, and later––while earning her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communications at Michigan Technological University––she enrolled in many web- and graphic-design courses. Tatiana moved to California in 2001, and spent more than a decade as web manager for Whittier College and as an adjunct librarian at Rio Hondo Community College. She now works full-time as the Web Interactive Services Manager at Claremont McKenna College. Just recently Tatiana was featured in LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/fashion/alltherage/la-ar-fashion-designer-tatiana-shabelnik-20130911,0,7099536.story website: www.tatianashabelnik.com