Tama Hochbaum was born in New York City, and received her BA from Brandeis University in Fine Arts. Upon graduation, she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship to study printmaking at Atelier 17 in Paris.[2] She later received a MFA in painting from Queens College in NYC in 1981.

Hochbaum had a solo exhibition, "OVER/TIME: Imaging Landscape" at CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Raleigh in 2018, as well as a solo exhibition of Self-Portraits, "As If A Mirror", at the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill from October through December, 2023. Her most recent exhibit of self-portraits was mounted at 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, entitled: VISAGE, FLORA, FACET & BEVEL. In 2022, a production of Hildegard Von Bingen's Opera, Ordo Virtutum, was presented at CAM Raleigh which included over 90 video projections that Hochbaum created. She will be having an exhibition in Saarbrücken, Germany in the spring of 2026. She will be the featured artist at FRANK Gallery for the CLICK 2025 Festival. She has been commissioned to create a 35-minute video consisting of her images to be projected while a string quartet plays the music of Chou Wen-cheung for the "Festival on the Hill" in Chapel Hill for the Spring, 2026 season.