Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie was born into the Bear and Raccoon Clans of the Seminole and Muscogee Nations and born for the Tsinajinnie Clan of the Navajo Nation, as her mother was Seminole and Muscogee and her father, Andrew Van Tsinajinnie, was Navajo. Hulleah was born in 1954 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Andrew (b 1916) was a painter and muralist who studied at the Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1978, Hulleah enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting with a photography minor in 1981.
She moved to the Navajo Reservation in 1966. In 1975, she began her art education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from University of California, Irvine in 2002.
She currently serves as the Director of the C.N Gorman Museum at the University of California, Davis.
She is also an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at University of California, Davis. At Davis, she has organized conferences, such as "Visual Sovereignty", bringing together indigenous photographers from around the world.
"I have been photographing for thirty-five years, but the photographs I take are not for White people to look at Native people. I take photographs so that Native people can look at Native people.
I make photographs for Native people." "lieutenant was a beautiful day when the scales fell from my eyes and I first encountered photographic sovereignty.
A beautiful day when I decided that I would take responsibility to reinterpret images of Native peoples. My mind was ready, primed with stories of resistance and resilience, stories of survival. My views of these images are aboriginally based - an indigenous perspective - not a scientific godly order but philosophically Native." J. J. J. C.
