Originally from West Texas, Medina earned her B.F.A. degree at Texas Tech University and her M.F.A. degree at UNT. Since 2006, she has served as a full-time professor of art at the Dallas College Mountain View campus in Dallas.

Since graduating from UNT, Medina has contributed to numerous art jury panels, speaking engagements, discussion panels and workshops in the cities of Dallas, San Antonio, Chicago, and San Diego. She was a member of the oldest artist-run co-op in Texas, 500X Gallery and served on the City of Dallas Public Art Committees.

Medina's art has been exhibited nationally in exhibits such as "Immigration, Migration, Movement & The Humanities" at Arizona State University and "Strive: An Exhibition Highlighting American Immigration & the American Dream" at the D’Art Center, Norfolk, Va. Most recently, her work was selected to be showcased in Arte Latino Now 2021, a virtual exhibit for the Center for Latino Studies at Queens University Charlotte in N.C., the Changarrito Artist of the Month 2021 for Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Texas, and solo exhibitions at the Norman Brown Gallery of Goldmark Cultural Center in 2021, and the Latino Cultural Center of Dallas in 2022.

She has curated exhibits such as "Contemporary Latino American Artists of the Metroplex" and "ELLA: Exhibiting Local Latina Artists." In 2021, Medina co-founded Nuestra Artist Collective and is collaboratively curating and exhibiting work with other Texas women artists who make art about the U.S.-Mexico border in a traveling exhibition that will be featured in Dallas, San Antonio and El Paso.

In 2022, Medina was accepted into the third Cohort Studio artist program at Cedars Union in Dallas and was selected to create a community engagement project and art exhibition in the inaugural Community Gallery Series at Arts Mission Oak Cliff in Dallas. Most recently, Medina was awarded a 2022 Nasher Artist Grant.

Through an exploration of fibers, painting, video, and audio, Medina’s art reflects U.S. American history from the point of view of the underrepresented voices in our communities, such as people of color, farm and domestic workers, the undocumented and women and children.

Tina Medina says she will use her Nasher Artist Grant to fund a documentarian project that captures the current cultural identity — the voices, memories, histories, and faces — of Oak Cliff, Dallas, a neighborhood that has ebbed and flowed with various ethnicities and economic classes throughout Dallas history and is now rapidly changing due to gentrification and the influx of developers and property tax changes. For the project, Medina will create audio records of personal family histories and individuals from various backgrounds living in the neighborhood, which will be incorporated into an audio-visual installation. The visual installation will include non-literal portraits of the individuals and families, to convey the importance of their contributions to the local community and the culture of our nation.