A 2001 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a critic of modernism and specializes in the intersection of art, architecture and design.

Ana Maria Tavares was born in 1958 in Belo Horizonte, where she attended high school.

[6] From October 2013 until January 2014, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee held a solo exhibition, Ana Maria Tavares: Deviating Utopias Opens, where she critiqued the role of Oscar Niemeyer's work in social progress and focused on the perceivedly dystopian nature of large metropolitan areas.

[1] Her October to December 2014 exhibition Euryale Amazonica at the Sicardi Gallery was inspired by Victoria amazonica (namely the archaic synonym of the same name), a flower popular among British gardeners in the Victorian England;[7][8] Emma Hurt of Houstonia said that Tavares and Gabriel de la Mora, who also exhibited alongside her, "presented two different kinds of artwork, but two exhibitions that successfully make viewers think, and look twice.

[2] Her artwork criticizes modernism as "an ideological construction with unexpected effects" and draws comparisons between modernist architects with their unorthodox counterparts.