From 1940 to 1958, she was a staff member of the Carnegie Institute and developed methods of dating ancient Mayan monuments based on the peculiarities of the fine arts style.

Proskouriakoff's most significant scientific contribution is considered to be the consistent application of the structural method to Mayan inscriptions of the classical period, as a result of which she proved that historical events were recorded on the monuments.

In 1998, part of Proskouriakoff's ashes was buried in the "J-23" building on the Acropolis in Piedras Negras, which she depicted in her archaeological reconstructions.

The family traveled to the United States in 1915, her father being asked by Tsar Nicholas II to oversee the production of munitions for World War I.

Initially educated as an architect, she later went on to work for Linton Satterthwaite and for the University of Pennsylvania Museum at the Maya site of Piedras Negras in 1936–37.

Upon her return to Philadelphia, she made a reconstruction drawing of the Piedras Negras acropolis which caught the attention of Silvanus Morley.

Morley realized the young architect's remarkable ability to visualize a ruined structure as it once stood and render it with artistic precision.

For example, her 1942 scholarly analysis of the hieroglyphics at the Takalik Abaj ruins in Guatemala establish that the site was in part Maya, settling a debate at that time.

[6] Analyzing the pattern of dates and hieroglyphs, she was able to demonstrate a sequence of seven rulers who ruled over a span of two hundred years.

[7] On Easter Sunday 1998,[8] after waiting more than a decade for political tensions to ease along the Usumacinta River, friend and colleague David Stuart carried Tatiana's ashes to Piedras Negras, where they were interred at the summit of the Acropolis, the group of structures in Tania's first and perhaps most famous reconstruction drawing, the same one that launched her career.