Girouard studied art at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, graduating with a BFA in 1968. When she moved to New York, Girouard befriended other Louisiana-born artists, including Lynda Benglis, Dickie Landry, and Keith Sonnier. Their work helped establish New York's post-minimalist scene. Although not as widely recognized as some of her contemporaries, she was "an early founding participant of 112 Greene St., FOOD, the Clocktower and PS1, Creative Time, Performance Art and the Fabric Workshop" and "In addition to her own projects she was involved in films, videos and performances by Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Laurie Anderson and the Natural History of the American Dancer, among others". Girouard worked as a designer with the New York theater group, Mabou Mines, in the seventies on several productions including The Red Horse Animation and The B. Beaver Animation. Along with Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark, Girouard was one of the founders of FOOD, an artist-run restaurant in New York that combined culinary arts with other visual and performance art practices. At FOOD, the acts of cooking and eating were seen as performances.
For her contribution to the 1981 exhibition Other Realities: Installations for Performance at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Girouard lead a ten-day workshop with local students and then turned material generated during the workshop into the basis for a performance. The remnants of the performance, including costumes, sets, and props, were then exhibited as an installation. Girouard's work was featured in a solo exhibition curated by Susan Rothenberg at CUE Art Foundation in 2004. More recently it was shown as part of 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) curated by Jessamyn Fiore at David Zwirner Gallery in New York in 2011, and included in the related publication of the same title. Fiore also curated Gordon Matta-Clark, Suzanne Harris, and Tina Girouard: The 112 Greene Street Years Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago in 2013.
In 2013 Girouard participated in the tribute to FOOD organized by Frieze New York
Tina Girouard was born in DeQuincy, LA in 1946, and graduated from with a BFA in art from UL Lafayette before moving to New York City. There, she pioneered video, installation and performance art while collaborating with others in the post-minimalist vortex of lower Manhattan and surrounds. She went on to a distinguished 40 year visual art career, with studios in Louisiana, New York and Haiti. Her work has been included in Documenta 6, the Venice Biennale, the Paris Biennale, with a mid-career retrospective at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City.
"Mardi Gras Suites and Quartets", 1974, was originally recorded on video at the legendary NYC artist collective, The Kitchen, known for its role in supporting the new art forms of the time - video and performance art.