The painter Tamar Balanchivadze was born into the illustrious Balanchivadze family. Her father, Meliton Balanchivadze (1862–1937), was a composer, while her brothers were George Balanchine (1904–1983), a choreographer, and Andria Balanchivadze (1906–1992), a composer.

Tamar Balanchivadze graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 1929 where she took classes under the guidance of Gigo Gabashvili. She later specialized in theatre painting.  In the years following, Tamar Balanchivadze collaborated with the Marjanishvili theatre, where she worked with Elene Akhvlediani. She then returned to her hometown of St. Petersburg and resumed working as a theatre painter in puppet theatre under the supervision of Sergey Obraztsov.

Tamar Balanchivadze passed away tragically during the Leningrad blockade in 1943. With the help of her brother Andria, she had a chance to escape the besieged city, but a train was attacked near Tikhoretsk, and her family has never heard from her again.

One of Tamar Balanchivadze’s most valuable works, ‘Old Man with a Straw’ (1927), is preserved at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, where we can see how refined and delicate her artistic demands were.