Tamara began her professional career in small Canadian features and commercials in the mid-1980s. Hailing from Vancouver, B.C., she is an alumnus of Emily Carr College of Art and Design. She has worked across Canada in Vancouver, Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto, as well as in New York, Buffalo, Los Angeles and the U.K. First working in the costume department, Tamara discovered that her combined artistic talent and love of cinema could be fully realized in the Art Department. Learning architectural drafting and graphic design both in night school and on the job, Tamara quickly rose in the art department to Art Director and Production Designer. She has worked on a variety of films and television projects, from X-Men to Star Trek to Nightmare Alley. She is a longstanding collaborator of Guillermo del Toro, working with him since the mid-1990s.

Tamara raised her family of two children, Rachel and David Woroner, with her husband, Ken Woroner, in Toronto, where she lived and worked in the film and television industry for over 35 years. Tamara now lives in a unique passive house that she designed with her husband off the coast of West Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, with their new puppy Django.