Educated at Raffles Girls' Secondary School and Victoria Junior College, Tan was a Loke Cheng Kim scholar.

In her first year at Oxford, she came across photography books, including Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) and August Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century (1986), and started taking photographs.

[1] Kenneth Paul Tan of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy states that "Pin was at the start of a trend among a younger generation of filmmakers to use film to examine and maybe even interpret the past, motivated by a sense of loss coming from how quickly Singapore has evolved.

Tan, with Yuni Hadi, co-founded the Fly by Night Video Challenge[4] which has seen several hundred short films made in the seven years it was run.

At the first stage, in the 1950s-70s, large numbers of Singaporeans living in village communities were dispersed and resettled-sometimes against their will-into modern public housing estates.

In the earlier decades, these mass produced high-rise apartment blocks-though clean,safe and convenient- were criticized for alienating the individual, atomizing community and lacking aesthetic character......

The visual and conceptual resemblance between apartment blocks and columbaria is uncanny, and the film does not miss the opportunity to foreground the irony.

The 8-part series on the history of Singapore architecture Building Dreams featured two episodes Tan directed – Dawn of a New Era and Spaces of Memory.

The pieces showed a rare look inside the dome of the Old Supreme Court Building, Singapore, as well as a house designed by renowned Singaporean architect Ho Kwong Yew.

It documents a man who tries multiple luck-enhancing methods to counter the curse of bad luck he believes he has because of his job as a grave exhumer.

In January 2016, the film was withdrawn from Malaysia's Titian Budaya Festival in Kuala Lumpur after authorities rejected an appeal to the chief censor to not withdraw a scene where ventriloquist Victor Khoo said "animals" in Malay, as the word has a double meaning.

The censor's report added that the "dialogue can create doubt and restlessness among citizens and may finally cause a security threat, disturbance of public peace and national defence".

Tan's interview with the elderly Polunin takes place shortly after he underwent brain surgery, a trauma that has caused him to lose, by his own admission, much 'brainpower'".

Snow City had its international premiere at the Singapore Biennale[24] and was invited to screen in competition at Cinéma du Réel.

"[29] In response, a group of 39 artists, including filmmakers Anthony Chen, Royston Tan and Kelvin Tong, released a joint statement expressing "deep disappointment" and urged the Media Development Authority to reverse the ban.

[32] In 2015, Tan directed one out of seven short films in 7 Letters, "Pineapple Town", created to celebrate Singapore's Golden Jubilee.

The Straits Times noted that "Tan's work," her first attempt at fiction, "has an allusive, multilayered depth that lingers in the mind after the credits roll".

It reveals items from 25 years ago, such as a bottle of water from the Singapore River and a Yellow Pages directory, while also showing daily life scenes like train commutes and a school fire drill.

The film also captures the selection of items for the new time capsule, including a life jacket and a lion's head mask.

Thereafter, it embarks on a whirlwind tour, travelling to Hot Docs, Canada, É Tudo Verdade, Brazil, and The Art of the Real, Lincoln Centre, USA.