She was a makeup artist, a Golden State Warrior Girl, an insurance underwriter and a business development executive. She’s also a film writer and director. And she’s a business owner. And a mom.
At 36 years old, Valencia resident Tasia Mantzoros is the definition of renaissance woman, with many talents and many interests that keep pushing her to accomplish more.
“I grew up with — and I still experience, I guess — ADD symptoms,” Mantzoros said during a recent telephone interview. “My mother put me in everything — gymnastics, track, cheer, dance, Girl Scouts — to kind of exert my energy. But really, she was doing me a great service, because I’m very creative and athletic, and I love working in my community and helping and kind of having my hands here and there.”
At 18 and 19 years old, Mantzoros was working as a choreographer for the NBA, teaching dance camps for the Laker Girls, the Denver Nuggets Dancers, the Sacramento Kings Dancers and the Warrior Girls. She was a Warrior Girl herself. In fact, though she grew up in the Bay Area, the first time she ever went to a Golden State Warriors basketball game in Oakland was as a Warrior Girl in 2006.
“I go into the stadium, and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is amazing,’” she said. “It’s an experience that I guess I keep perpetuating, because my first time to New York was the day I moved there.”
Before going to New York to work, she would go to Nepal to volunteer. And before going to Nepal, she would work in the corporate world in the Bay Area. However, Mantzoros would first go to school to learn how to do makeup professionally in film and fashion.
After working in the NBA as a Warrior Girl and dance team choreographer, she did makeup on a freelance basis. But that work wasn’t always steady. While doing makeup on one particular film, someone she was working with told her about a secure corporate job with a company called Autonomy Corp.
Mantzoros applied, got the job, and she worked her way up to a spot as business development executive, continuing all the while to do freelance makeup jobs. Hewlett-Packard would ultimately purchase Autonomy. Mantzoros feared that layoffs were coming, and so, she started thinking about her next move.
Inspired by “The Alchemist,” a novel by Paulo Coelho about a young shepherd who travels from Spain to the Egyptian desert to discover his legend and fulfill his dreams, Mantzoros decided she’d like to travel to another country to discover more about herself.
In 2012, at 24 years old, Mantzoros set out on a trip to Nepal. She volunteered with a rural community development program just outside of the capital city, Kathmandu. She worked with orphans, walking them to and from school, doing enrichment activities with them, and helping them develop skills.
During her three weeks there, Mantzoros said she experienced intense culture shock. She described the lack of basic amenities like running water. As a result, she relied on using body wipes for hygiene. The excessive moisture gave her a fungal infection on her legs.
Lacking access to medical care, Mantzoros found that she could treat the infection using natural remedies that she picked up from a local market. The experience, she said, deeply changed her perspective, which informed her next big move.
She’d heard about something called the Green Medicine program at The Open Center in Manhattan, New York. The program, she’d learned, would explore ways of using herbs to keep well and treat common illnesses. Getting to New York became the goal.
Of course, doing something like that is easier said than done. She couldn’t just pick up and move to a place she’d never been. Or could she?
Her solution: “I sold all my stuff,” she said.
In 2012, Mantzoros moved across the country. While in the Green Medicine program, she did makeup work to pay the bills. Once she finished Green Medicine, however, she didn’t want to go back to California. She decided to make New York her home.
She applied her makeup skills to teaching at the Makeup Academy in Manhattan and then found work as a makeup artist at Elizabeth Arden, a beauty company in the city.
While in New York, Mantzoros also got married and became a mother. In 2018, when she was pregnant with her second child, she’d had enough of the cold weather.
“It was the worst winter I think New York had had in a long time,” she said. “We were in the house for nine months. The winters were getting longer, and as a California native — both of us (she and her husband) — we didn’t know how to raise our kids in New York. We were like, ‘This is not the place.’”
After moving to Southern California — the heart of the film industry — it felt only natural for Mantzoros to pursue a goal of making films. It wasn’t a sudden shift. She’d crewed many films before, but now she was ready to take the helm of her own projects.
In 2019, Mantzoros wrote, produced and directed a short film called “Jender,” which is available to stream on the Reveel video streaming service. She also wrote and acted in a 2025 short film called “What It Means.”
However, she ultimately wants to make documentary films. She said she’d seen documentaries that had given her a new perspective on life.
In 2021, she began shooting one of her own docs about the group of Native Americans who, in March 1964, occupied Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. Mantzoros hopes to complete shooting this summer and have it ready for next year’s film festival circuit.
“I love real stories and real people and understanding the human condition,” Mantzoros said. “It broadens our own perspective, and that can make us more compassionate. And it can inspire activism. And activism doesn’t always have to be loud and picketing. It can be doing what you’re inspired to do.”
One of those inspirations was the establishment of Intuitiv Media, Mantzoros’s boutique media production company that specializes in film, music, creative direction and choreography.
This year, she also established another company that utilizes the knowledge she picked up in Nepal and at that Green Medicine program in New York. The company, Aromapotheka, is an online café and market that offers small-batch soaps, oils and mists made from organic and kosher herbs.
Jill Davis of Portland, Oregon, said she was the first customer. She ordered some oil for her face.
“I applied it, and then, once it dried, which is within seconds, I felt my face, and it was so soft,” Davis said during a telephone interview. “My mother had very soft cheeks naturally, and so it was like touching my mother.”
Davis, whose mother died about 30 years ago, got a little choked up. She’s been an Aromapotheka customer since.
Davis had nothing but nice things to say about Mantzoros. The two have become friends, and Mantzoros even works with her with meditation and got her into journaling. Mantzoros has been, according to Davis, a very positive force in her life.
“And the energy,” Davis said. “She (Mantzoros) is amazing. There have been a couple times I said to her, ‘You must be tired.’ She’d always say, ‘No, I’m fine.’”
Proving Davis’ point, Mantzoros was the assistant director and choreographer on the short film “Disco Beats,” which is currently making its way through the film festival circuit. Ken Arquelio, who wrote, directed and starred in the film, said Mantzoros is a total force and full of great ideas.
“She has her hands in a lot of things,” Arquelio said during a telephone interview. “The more time I got to spend with her, the more aware I became of the amount of things, the amount of plates that she said she’s capable of juggling.”
“Disco Beats,” which is about an 80-year-old man who wants to learn how to disco dance so he can surprise his wife on their 60th wedding anniversary, concludes with a heavily choreographed dance number that takes place in heaven. It was that scene that made Arquelio realize that he needed just the right person for the job.
Arquelio said Mantzoros came heavily recommended. He saw many other choreographers for the job, but it was a routine that Mantzoros put down on video and sent him that confirmed she could be something special. She certainly put her touch on that final scene.
“If you ask anyone working on set, that was their favorite moment,” Arquelio said. “It was the end of a very, very long day … She essentially directed that last scene. I’d like to take credit for it. I definitely had it in my mind, because when I wrote it, I knew what I wanted it to look like, but I had no idea how to choreograph a scene like that.”
Additionally, Mantzoros is preparing to return to school to study both film and psychology. She explained that studying psychology will support her in multiple ways — not only in her creative work, but also in her personal life, particularly as a mother of a child with autism and another with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
“It’s twofold,” she said. “It’s for me to help me better understand how to support my children as a mother, and it also helps me to be able to create complex characters, to be able to share information from a psychological fundamental standpoint.”
But Mantzoros isn’t stopping there. She talked of still other plans, like the psychology and arts school she wants to open.
She had it all planned out — a school where psychology is integrated into the curriculum from a young age, teaching kids the creative process through art, while also using that process to build emotional intelligence. It is, she said, about helping kids understand themselves and others better, starting early on.
“Again,” Mantzoros said, “this is how my mind works.”
She admitted that she’s never really followed a traditional path in her life. She said it’s that mentality that might be her greatest strength, adding that every chapter of her journey — from dance and corporate work to volunteering, filmmaking and motherhood — has given her depth and purpose.
In other words, she said she’s not just doing it all. Rather, she’s using it all to serve her creative expressions — to create impact, tell meaningful stories and build a better world for the next generation.
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
