Tessa Teixeira was born in 1969, in Ermelo, South Africa. She completed a Bachelor’s in Primary Education, majoring in Art, in 1991 through the University of the Witwatersrand and her self-portrait at the time, was kept by the JCE Arts Department. In her twenties and thirties, she was extensively involved in projects addressing access for housing in lower Income sectors, she started a NGO and raised the money to build two schools for primary school children who were receiving tuition under trees, and worked for The Mineworkers Development Agency, the development wing of The National Union of Mineworkers, addressing rural development, economic needs in South Africa.

In 2006 she started actively focusing on her Art practice, and embarked on various short Art development programmes in San Francisco in the USA and London in 2010 and 2011. She returned to Johannesburg at the end of 2011 and has been developing her practice and work focused on Existential Philosophy and Ecology – Climate narratives, aligned to the materiality exploration in Mixed Media, Painting, Installation and Printmaking. Since 2012, she has exhibited, auctioned, and sold work for private collections, in Local and International group shows, some recent exhibitions which include: ‘1.5 Degrees’ in Berlin, Germany (2021), ‘ What’s next for earth? - Depletion’ – MAHB, Stanford University, USA (2021), ‘Enviro Art gallery 2021’ – Dukes University, USA (2021), ‘Amref Artball Auction – pre- featured on Artsy – New York (2019), ‘Optimism’ Endless Editions Biennial in New York (2018), ‘Art of Lithography’ - The University of the Witwatersrand Museum (WAM) and a Solo show - ‘Nothing stands still’ - Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (2018).