Tania has spent her life around movies, her earliest childhood memories are accompanying her father to film sets, including learning about the craft from her father while he was involved with the ground breaking television series Fireside Theatre, later reading scripts for the production.  After studying at Mills College in California, where Tania received a degree in Theatre the next few years were spent at the Pasadena Play House, the Provincetown Play House in Massachusetts and the Cleveland Play House before she returned to Hollywood.  

Tania also spent several years at the Worldwide Publishing Company in New York editing an art publication.

Returning to education to get a Masters Degree Tania chose to become a specialist in language and speech disorders receiving a Speech Pathology degree. Recruited by the Los Angeles County Superintendent’s office she was part of a small group of specialists working to introduce Autistic children into the public education system.

In A World Alone is the first film Tania made and features these uniquely challenged children.  The film was used throughout the school system as a training tool for teachers.  As part of the training Tania visited schools throughout Los Angeles identifying children misdiagnosed or in the wrong educational settings.

Leaving public education Tania started her own specialized program for developmentally delayed or disabled infants, children and adults.  In its 30 years her agency, Behavior, Education and Learning Institute, has provided over a million hours of service to these families.

Tania has always maintained her love of writing, and along with her late husband, John Francis Mahoney, started a newspaper which they owned for 14 years. During these years Tania served as editor and journalist. At the same time, Tania wrote several plays, one, a deliberately politically incorrect comedy about women running businesses, was produced in Del Mar, California.

Following the 1989 fall of the Berlin wall, Tania, her husband and sister, Maria set out to pursue a claim for family property in East Germany that Eva Wisbar (her mother) had filed years earlier under the United States Foreign Claims Commission.

The claim process which took over a year and came to nothing led Tania with her husband to write the novel, The Last Cemetery in Berlin.  A highly fictionalized version of their actual experiences in Berlin. The property claim made it possible to learn about the Wysbar-Bruckmann-Krojanker families and begin to understand what had happened to them.

But it was only in 1999 that the real history of her parents was revealed when a German professor contacted Tania, saying he had some surprising information for her.

The surprise was that he had found a manuscript buried in the Harvard University Library basement written sixty years earlier, in 1939, by Eva Wisbar. In it Eva had penned a detailed account of her marriage to Frank Wisbar, the Nazi take over of the German film industry, her attempts to get her husband, by then a very well known German director, a film contract in another country, and the need to get her husband and daughters out of Germany before it was too late.

The professor, Detlef Garz, came to California and expressed his hope to get Eva Wisbar’s manuscript published as a book. This was successfully achieved and the book appeared at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001.

This is the only account of the lives of Eva and Frank Wisbar as a couple with one exception.  Shortly after Detlef  Garz’s discovery, one morning emptying old boxes stored in her  garage for years Tania unearthed an old, yellowed, hand written manuscript. It had been written by Tania and Maria’s governess, Annenie, the same young woman who had taken them personally out of Germany to safety in Switzerland when the children were very young.

Since Eva had spent so much of the first year of Tania’s life looking for a film contract in another country for her husband, Annenie had kept a diary for Eva so she would know how the children were doing in her absence. In these yellow pages the father is a very different one than the children ever saw again: a devoted father, always playing with his daughters, constantly filming them and taking countless pictures.

Between these two very different manuscripts, Eva’s and Annenie’s, the rise of the Nazis and the destruction of one family is revealed.  The movie project The Last Cemetery in Berlin is about a property claim, the role of governments in ordinary citizen’s lives, the betrayals and lies that cross generations and the harm war reeks on children in countless ways, often not becoming evident for many years.

The Last Cemetery in Berlin is Tania's first co-producing opportunity and even though she grew up in the business, Tania is glad to be partnered with the very experienced Jonathan Sanger. She is also developing a television special entitled The Claims and has just completed a 3 act pay Tree of Gray Leaves, which is due to go into production later this year.