Anna Marie Tendler has built a creative life that refuses to fit inside a single medium. An American multimedia artist known for her photography, makeup and hairstyling, and textile crafts, she has moved from beauty blogging to gallery walls to the memoir shelf, all while speaking candidly about mental health. Hers is a story about protecting your own identity while the world watches, and about turning the hardest chapters of a life into work that other people recognize themselves in.
From Beauty Blogging to Published Author
Tendler’s career began online. She started “The Daily Face” blog in 2007, pairing a love of makeup with a gift for clear, personal writing. By 2016 she had turned that expertise into a book, “Pin It!: 20 Fabulous Bobby Pin Hairstyles,” which cemented her standing in the beauty world. In a 2019 Nylon profile, she reflected on those Tumblr blogging days, on doing makeup for her husband, comedian John Mulaney, and on seeing herself as an artist first. That last point would prove to be the through line of everything that followed.
An Education in Craft and History
Her hands-on skill is matched by formal study. Tendler holds a master’s degree in costume studies from New York University, and that grounding in the history of dress and decoration is visible across her practice. Her own site describes an artistic journey that spans textiles, photography, drawing, painting, and interior design. One of the most distinctive strands of that work is her Victorian-style lampshades: meticulous, old-world craft objects that double as a personal, expressive outlet.
Rooms in the First House
Tendler’s emergence as a fine artist came with “Rooms in the First House,” the photo series her own site singles out as her breakout work. Created during isolation, the photographs are haunting; a 2022 HASTA feature describes them as vividly conveying the emotional loss of a marriage and an intense redefining of one’s identity. The series came out in 2021 and traveled, with showings in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Brooklyn, including The Other Art Fair Brooklyn. For many viewers, these images were a first encounter with Tendler the artist, distinct from Tendler the public figure.
Divorce, Recovery, and Reinvention
The loss those photographs explore was not abstract. Tendler’s marriage to John Mulaney ended in divorce, a rupture that unfolded while she was in the spotlight. Rather than letting the headlines define her, she expressed her feelings through her art. She has also been open about how difficult this period was: in 2021, after a stretch marked by anxiety and depression, she sought help at a psychiatric hospital. Her willingness to speak plainly about that experience has made her a meaningful voice for mental health awareness, and it gives her work an honesty that audiences respond to.
Men Have Called Her Crazy
Tendler’s memoir, “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” was published on August 13, 2024. It has been described as her reintroduction to the world as an artist on her own, a book that centers her story rather than anyone else’s. In a podcast conversation with guest host Talia Schlanger, Tendler talked about her mental health journey and how photography kept her grounded through it. The memoir extends what her visual art began: taking private struggle and shaping it into something others can hold onto.
Where Her Journey Stands Today
Today, Tendler lives in Connecticut and continues to work across the full breadth of her practice, from textiles, photography, drawing, and painting to interior design, while writing and speaking up for mental health. The arc from a beauty blog to handmade craft, gallery photography, and a memoir is unusual, but it has a consistent center: Tendler makes work out of her own life, honestly and on her own terms.
For anyone who has felt the pressure of what others expect, Anna Marie Tendler’s creative journey is a useful example. She has treated every setback, from a public divorce to a mental health crisis, as material rather than an ending. The result is a body of work, from lampshades to photographs to the printed page, that is unmistakably her own.
