Tabitha Soren – Bio, Family, Was the Photographer Married To Michael Oher?

Quick Facts

Tabitha Soren is an artist popularly known for her time on MTV News as a former political correspondent in the 1990s where she initiated the Choose or Lose campaign. She is also known for her interviews with top political figures like and musicians like .

Given her thoroughness and love for her job, Soren became a Knight fellow and Peabody Award-winning journalist. Nevertheless, after years of being on the TV, she found another love – photography. As Tabitha Soren became more engrossed in fine arts photography and less interested in journalism, her acclaim as an artist has greatly appreciated.

Tabitha Soren’s Bio

The journalist turned fine art photographer was born Tabitha Lee Sornberger in San Antonio, Texas, the U.S. on the 19th of August 1967. Not very much is known about her early years but one thing that has stood out from those years was her love for media, art, and photography.

Tabitha Soren completed her high school education at Hampton High School and went to New York University (NYU) where she graduated with a degree in journalism and politics.

Following her graduation, she joined the media industry as a journalist, becoming one of MTV’s first political reporters, in the 1990s. She pitched that MTV covers the 1992 presidential election. Part of the outcome was the Choose or Lose campaign which led to an upswing in youth voter turnout. The campaign also received a Peabody Award.

She snared numerous interviews with , first as a presidential candidate and then as a president. She also interviewed , , Anita Hill, Yasser Arafat, Bob Dole and a number of musicians including and . Clips of her 1995 interview with Tupac were included in the 2003 documentary film Tupac: Resurrection.

Tabitha Soren also worked for NBC Nightly News and for ABC News. In addition to her journalism work, she also scored several acting gigs on TV shows and films. Soren is mentioned in the American History X (1998), had a cameo role in The Cable Guy as herself and was in the TV show, Week In Rock.

She became so famous in the media circle and among her audience that teenagers used to clamour for her autograph. However, she was soon to discover that journalism wasn’t for her, at least not in a way that reached out to her teeming audience as she would have loved to. She wanted to tell stories in a more subtle way, a kind of truth different from the normal journalism she did. She grew up taking pictures as a way to remember the people and places that made up her childhood. Soren ultimately decided she would take pictures rather than be on TV. She accepted a year-long Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 1997 and left MTV the following year.

Tabitha Soren’s Career In Photography

While she had fun clicking the camera for lasting memories as a child, Tabitha Soren stumbled on professional photography almost by accident. She grew “tired” of journalism and wanted to try documentary filmmaking thus, enrolling at Stanford. However, after taking a photography class, she fell in love with the art and has continued shooting since then.

Her professional photography career started in 2003 when she accompanied her husband on assignments and shot pictures for the stories intended for his book, Moneyball. Soren authored her first book, Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream (2017) based on those players she photographed for her husband. She followed them for 13 years, from when they were drafted until they were out of the baseball league.

Her projects have been published in media outlets such as The New York Times, Canteen, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, Sports Illustrated, and New York. Soren’s works have also been featured in both private and public museums and galleries around the country are such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, the New Orleans Museum of Art, San Fransisco’s Pier 24 Photography, Berkley Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station in Ohio and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in Louisiana.

Some of her photography series include Running which shows the fight or flight response. It features isolated individuals running in everyday settings like foggy forests, freeway ramps, railroad tracks, and in fields. Others include Panic Beach, Uprooted, Fantasy Life, Surface Tension, and As Far As You Know.

Finally, Soren is telling her stories the way she has always wanted to, longer stories in a more subtle way. She reaches out to her audience, touching on the twists of fate in life that can unhinge them, through her works.

Tabitha Soren’s Family

She tied the knot with American author and financial journalist, Michael Lewis on October 4, 1997. The duo met in 1996 during the presidential campaign when Lewis interviewed Soren for The New Republic magazine.

Lewis is the author of the book-turned-blockbuster-film Moneyball. The adorable couple share three children, daughters – Quinn Tallulah Lewis, Dixie Lewis, and son – Walker Jack Lewis. The family of five lives in Berkley, California.

Was The Photographer Married To Michael Oher?

Michael Lewis’ 2006 book, The Blind Side was inspired by none other than NFL superstar, . It talks about the evolution of Ameican football and covers Oher’s final year in high school and his meteoric rise to fame. A film of the same name was released in 2009 and went on to win an Academy Award.

To set the record straight on the relationship between Soren and Oher, Soren was never married to the NFL player. The conjectures most likely came from Google which auto-fills ‘Michael Oher wife’ with ‘Tabitha Soren’. This could be as a result of the search engine’s SEO metrics that are based on relevancy.

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