Around 1973 she began undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she focused on video and performance because of what she saw as their links to everyday life.
Her aesthetic in this period was deeply influenced by the work of Allan Kaprow and the Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as by the Chicago Imagist school of videomakers, which included her teacher Phil Morton.
As a visual artist, Tamblyn worked in performance and new media and was in the forefront of those experimenting with video and computer technologies for the creation of conceptual art.
[6] Tamblyn's work was exhibited during her lifetime at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Pacific Film Archives (California), San Francisco Exploratorium, Wexner Center for Contemporary Art (Ohio); Walter Phillips Gallery in the Banff Centre (Canada), and numerous other international venues.
[7] Tamblyn's second CD-ROM, Mistaken Identities, which set up comparisons between the life stories of ten prominent women, won a number of awards, including Finalist Award at the 1996 New York Exposition of Short Film and Video, an Honorable Mention in the 1996 "New Voices, New Visions" contest sponsored by Wired magazine, and First Prize in the 1997 International Festival of the Image in Colombia.
In 1984 she was invited by the Los Angeles Woman's Building to create As the Worm Turns, a work that challenged the anti-pornography position held by some feminists.
Tamblyn was a prolific critic, going on to write dozens of reviews and a number of essays for Afterimage, High Performance, and Leonardo in addition to the above publications.
She was known for producing finished articles from a first draft, without the need for revisions, an ability she attributed to her lifelong habit of daily journal writing.