THE RUNDOWN
- Tina Knowles is the mother of Beyoncé and Solange Knowles.
- She has a very close relationship with them and her grandchildren, posting often about Beyoncé’s daughters, Blue Ivy and Rumi, on Instagram.
- She released a memoir, Matriarch, in April 2025, where she wrote about raising her superstar daughters.
She’s Beyoncé’s mom, Jay-Z’s mother-in-law, and the grandmother to Blue Ivy, Sir, and Rumi—but there’s much more to Tina Knowles than just her famous family.
“It sounds corny and cliché, but if everything was taken from me, I promise you, if I still have my family, I will be good,” she told ELLE in April 2025. “I know that from my innermost parts, that as long as I have my family, then we could go through anything. We could lose everything, and we’d be okay. I’ve lost everything before, but I was fine because I had my family. And I taught my kids that.”
Here’s everything you need to know about her.
Beyoncé is named after her.
Knowles was born Celestine Ann Beyoncé—her last name a misspelling on her birth certificate of her family name Beyincé—The New York Times reported. She was the youngest of seven children, with a mother who was a seamstress and a father who was a longshoreman. Her family has Creole heritage, and she was raised in Galveston, Texas.
She owned a salon while Beyoncé was growing up.
She worked as a makeup artist in Los Angeles before opening a Houston hair salon called Headliners, which she ran for over 20 years. Knowles has shared old videos from Headliners, including some featuring members of Destiny’s Child. “Hairstyling is more than the act of doing hair—it’s how a mother’s love is transferred through that care,” she wrote in her memoir, Matriarch.
Knowles is the vice chairwoman of Beyoncé’s hair care brand Cécred.
The brand Cécred, which Beyoncé launched in 2024, is inspired by her mom’s salon, and Knowles is the company’s vice chairwoman. “How many of y’all knew my first job was sweeping hair in my mama’s salon?” Beyoncé wrote on Instagram. “Destiny’s Child got our start by performing for clients while they were getting their hair done. I was exposed to so many different kinds of entrepreneurial women in her salon. I saw firsthand how the ways we nurture and celebrate hair care can directly impact our souls. I watched her heal and be of service to so many women. Having learned so much on my hair journey, I’ve always dreamed of carrying on her legacy. I can’t wait for you to experience what I’ve been creating.”
Knowles has a major Instagram presence.
She is known for her candor on social media, where she has over 4 million followers. She has posted photos of her granddaughter Blue Ivy, behind-the-scenes shots from fashion shows and Beyoncé concerts, and well-wishes to fans.
She also hosted the Facebook Watch talk show called Talks With Mama Tina, which featured Zendaya, John David Washington, and Kelly Rowland as guests.
In the early days of Destiny’s Child, Knowles did all the hairstyling for the group.
Knowles used her beauty experience to style the hair of the group’s original members: Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Roberson, and LeToya Luckett. In Matriarch, she recounts a memorable moment on the set of the “No, No, No (Part 2)” music video. When Beyoncé asked her mother to give her blonde highlights, Knowles realized she hadn’t brought enough extensions. Thinking on her feet, she cut off some of her own highlights to use as extensions for her daughter.
She also made costumes for Destiny’s Child.
Knowles’s mother was a dressmaker, and she learned about fashion from her. “Sewing and fashion were always huge in my family. We were really poor, but we were the best-dressed because my mother made all of our clothes. She would shop at Goodwill to find really good shoes,” she told W in May 2025.
Knowles used her dressmaking skills to create outfits for Destiny’s Child. “With the clothes that I made for them, people would copy the costumes, or we would see the runways and they would have a garment with a similar sleeve on it or cut-outs—that type of thing. It was mind-boggling, but it began pretty early on when they were young, like 18,” she told ELLE in April 2025.
She took inspiration from Motown looks for the group’s outfits. “We were big Motown fans, my ex-husband and I both. The girls looked at tapes of Motown, and that’s where we got our inspiration,” she said in an August 2020 video conversation with The Washington Post.
Music executives pushed back on the costumes, saying that Knowles’s designs would keep Destiny’s Child from having the kind of success that artists Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears had. “[The record label] had a meeting with my husband, and they told him that, basically, I was the problem, and that I was going to be the reason why the girls would be limited in their crossover appeal because they were a little too flashy, a little too Motown, but really what they meant was they were a little too Black.”
She started a fashion line with Beyoncé and made red carpet looks for her daughters.
In 2005, she and Beyoncé launched the line House of Deréon, which was named for Knowles’s mother, Agnèz Deréon. They introduced the line on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The affordable line eventually shuttered.
Knowles has also made Beyoncé red carpet looks for events like the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards, and movie premieres. According to The New York Times, she made a white dress that Solange wore to perform at a 2017 farewell party for President Obama held at the White House.
In 2024, Knowles told People that she was diagnosed with breast cancer after missing mammograms. “And I think as women, sometimes we get so busy, and we get so wrapped up and running around, but you must go get your test. Because if I had not gotten my test early, I mean, I shudder to think what could have happened to me,” she said. She was told she had stage 1 cancer in her left breast and had surgery that removed the cancer. Her ex-husband Matthew Knowles had his own breast cancer diagnosis in 2019.
She collects art from Black artists.
Knowles has an art collection that features works by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Elizabeth Catlett, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle.
She began collecting art when she was 19. “When my kids were growing up, it was really important to me that they saw images of African Americans,” she told Vanity Fair. She and Richard Lawson, her former husband, opened the WACO (Where Art Can Occur) Theater Center, a 99-seat theater and gallery in Los Angeles which focuses on Black art and culture.
WACO held yearly galas. In 2022, there was a Harlem Renaissance theme, and Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Blue Ivy all attended. In 2019,
“My mother has always been invested in making women feel beautiful,” Beyoncé told the New York Times in 2017. “Whether it was through someone sitting in her hair chair or making a prom dress for one of the girls at church. And her art collection always told the stories of women wanting to do the same.”
She’s close with her grandchildren.
Knowles is a grandmother of four: Beyoncé’s children, Blue Ivy, Rumi, and Sir, and Solange’s son, Julez Smith. Blue Ivy often serves as her beautician, with Knowles posting videos of her granddaughter helping her with her eyebrows and doing her makeup for a fashion show that Julez was walking in. Knowles considers herself and Blue Ivy very similar, saying, “She’s a bossy little Capricorn like her grandma,” on The Jennifer Hudson Show.
She also has adventures with her other grandkids. She’s shared videos of Rumi’s appearances on the Cowboy Carter Tour and praised her musical talent in interviews. Knowles also loves to read books with her grandson, Sir. She’s talked about him being bright and said that he has different interests than his sisters. “Sir is very quiet,” Tina told E! in May 2024. “[He] does all of the numbers stuff, so he’s not into fashion as much.”
She wanted to be a singer.
When Knowles was in high school, she started an all-girls group called The Veltones, but her mother didn’t consider it a viable career path. “I wanted to be a singer, but you know, this little town was about that big, and there were no singers there, and that’s what my mom said. My mom…as much as I loved her and she wanted the best for me—she would’ve done anything for me to be a singer—she really didn’t have any hope,” Knowles said on CBS Mornings.
She collaborates with her daughters.
Knowles made a cameo in Beyoncé’s 2020 Disney+ visual film Black Is King. She also appeared on Solange’s 2016 album A Seat at the Table. She speaks on the track “Tina Taught Me,” saying, “I’ve always been proud to be Black. Never wanted to be nothing else.”
She divorced and remarried.
In 2009, she split from her husband Matthew Knowles, to whom she’d been married for 33 years. In 2015, she married actor Richard Lawson, an old friend and the father of actress Bianca Lawson, in Newport Beach, California. “There was a time when I doubted if I would find love again,” she told People. “But I was determined to be happy.”
In 2023, Knowles and Lawson divorced. She alluded to the breakup in her book, saying that she “deserved so much more” and that she knew she “would never feel whole, cherished, loved and respected” in the marriage.
She’s received awards.
In March, Billboard honored her as its first Mother of the Year at the outlet’s annual Women in Music event. In her acceptance speech, she admitted, “There is no formal training class to prepare you for the most important job that you’ll ever have in your life, you will most likely screw up sometimes. I know I did, and unfortunately, there are no do-overs. And if you are blessed enough to have had a great mother yourself, it helps tremendously. But at the end of the day, it is really on you to lean on your mother’s wit.”
She was also featured at the Glamour 2024 Women of the Year awards. In 2016, she was given the Inspiring Leadership Award at Essence Festival, becoming the first person to receive that honor.
