Former Olympic photographer Eliza Tan brings a unique perspective to Adobe

As a talented, intrepid photographer with a passion for traveling the world and exploring different cultures, Eliza Tan has always used her camera to engage with, understand, and illuminate people — especially those who aren’t typically the subject of a photo.

Viewing life through her lens of curiosity, empathy, and discovery, she’s been drawn to new experiences that emphasize art and authenticity, diversity and human connection. These experiences have motivated her personal and professional pursuits as a traveler and a creative — from covering two Olympic Games as a photographer right out of college to her current role at Adobe as a product ecosystem manager for Adobe’s digital video and audio products.

Tan is accustomed to taking pictures, profiling others, and working behind the scenes. With a nervous laugh, she says she’s not used to being the one interviewed. But as her photography portfolio shows, everyone has a story — and that includes the storytellers.

During the Games, we’re captivated by the extraordinary abilities and performances of exceptional athletes, but we’re also inspired by the humanizing stories that make us relate to, believe in, and cheer for them. This is Tan’s Olympic story.

Unique perspective: Exploring the world through a camera

Born in Singapore and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tan developed an early love of video and photography nurtured by her family. As children, she and her sister produced a short homemade film that attracted so much neighborhood attention that her parents — her dad was a hobby videographer and her mom previously worked for Canon — got Tan a camera of her own.

While Tan pursued her passion, she acquired a deeper interest in visual storytelling, particularly focusing on people from faraway places and underrepresented communities. When she was a teenager, Tan traveled to northern Africa and the Middle East, where she began to use photography to confront prejudices and challenge stereotypes.

“The goal of my work is to provide insights into the lives and personalities of people from multicultural communities in an effort to uncover shared experiences and humanity despite our differences,” Tan told "The Star" newspaper. Growing up in multi-ethnic Malaysia, Tan said she was grateful to have been exposed to people of many different backgrounds.

In 2016 when she was 17-years-old, armed with ambition, wanderlust, and the desire to document life visually through her work, Tan decided to take that diverse perspective to the United States to study media and international studies at Asbury University in Kentucky.

While still a student, Tan was commissioned to host multiple photo exhibitions, at which she showcased her work, including human interest profiles on international students and ethnic minorities in China, Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere. One of those exhibitions got her referred for a photographer position at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Tan was elated, but not long after that, the world she loved to travel around was upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. When the announcement came that the Games would be postponed, her plans were put on pause. Having never studied formally what she was now hoping to do professionally, Tan took the opportunity to apply for a master’s degree in photojournalism from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

One year later, Tan traveled to Tokyo for the rescheduled Summer Games. As a broadcast photographer, her wide-ranging responsibilities included creating and curating original content, developing multimedia for instructional manuals on proper broadcast operations, and managing the official digital photo library.

But the role, an exciting yet challenging one, was much more than that. Tan worked for the host broadcast organization that produced and distributed all of the Games footage to hundreds of rights-holding broadcasters around the world. She needed to navigate the intensity, scrutiny, and brand sensitivity of the Games, as well as the complex, overlapping bureaucracies of the sports organizations, venue operators, media companies, and governments — not to mention thousands of staffers. The role required maturity, tact, and high competence.

And she soon proved she had a knack for it.

Soft skills and human connection: Behind the scenes of a global broadcast

Tan’s high-leverage job involved covering not only the sports and major events, such as the opening and closing ceremonies, but also the behind-the-scenes broadcast operations. She had to know all the cameras and equipment used, learn all the venues and various VIPs, and understand complicated production protocols and fastidious Olympic brand guidelines.

“We were taking pictures of the sports,” she says, “but it was a lot more than that too, which was incredible to see and be part of because there’s so much that happens behind the scenes — how it’s all captured and broadcast to the world.”

The Olympics experience opened Tan’s eyes to everything involved in putting on and televising one of the most watched events in the world. Sometimes, her assignment was to get a shot nobody else had access to. Other times, it was metadata tagging, managing, and delivering innumerable digital assets. Still other times, it was documenting the cutting-edge virtual reality and 8k video technology while on private tours.

As grueling as the Games were — working every day for six weeks, sometimes for 20 hours a day, away from family and friends — Tan eagerly agreed to do it all again when she was invited back for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

For someone still so early in her career, Tan recalls how covering the Olympics was crucial not just to developing employment skills and experience, but to determining her job priorities and values.

Tan was one of just four accredited broadcast photographers — the others were from Australia, Brazil, and Sweden — and she was the youngest. “I didn’t feel qualified at first,” she says. “It was pretty humbling but then also a confidence-boosting experience, in a sense, to be trusted with more of a managerial role.”

On such a small, diverse team, Tan recognized how much she enjoyed working with people from different backgrounds, learning about their lives and viewpoints and how they influenced her perspective. A multilinguist and natural problem-solver, she was able to speak to a range of stakeholders in Beijing, including local Chinese representatives.

Interactions like those, she says, underscored the significance of professional relationships and clear communication.

“We had to know all these details and keep track of all these people and follow all these specific guidelines — all in such a high-pressure, high-security environment — so who you know becomes really important. I definitely felt like when I went to Beijing, the stakes were higher, but I already kind of knew what was up and had all these key relationships and skills I’d developed.”

Perhaps the best relationship Tan developed was a close friendship she still maintains today. She was waiting in line to check out camera equipment and overheard someone speaking in Cantonese, one of the dialects she knows. Tan went over to talk to the young woman, and it turned out she was another female photographer from Malaysia.

“That was such a cool moment, and from there we just struck up a friendship,” Tan says, recalling how they’d hang out whenever they could in Tokyo, Beijing, and back home in Malaysia sharing life stories, work struggles, and where to find the best shot angles.

“The Olympics is about sports, but it’s also about so much more, especially the human connection that happens on and off the field,” Tan says. “It’s moments like that — amidst a busy schedule, missing home a lot honestly, and during a time when I was trying to reconnect with some of my own cultural heritage — that really stick out.”

Those moments of human connection were particularly vital since both the postponed 2020 Summer Games and the 2022 Winter Games that Tan covered took place during the pandemic when public health measures made the already demanding job of working the Olympics even more difficult.

“I feel like it [the job] seems glamorous on the outside, but it’s a lot to be away from friends and family for a month and a half, often with no days off, barely any time for yourself,” she says. “Working the Olympics can be an incredibly lonely experience, and even more so during COVID because we were completely separate from the public. It was very isolating.”

Joining Adobe: Creativity, diversity, and relating to customers

As a photographer, Tan is always looking for the perfect shot. And the Olympics, a visually sumptuous spectacle of thrilling drama and raw humanity, provided her plenty of opportunities to take those pictures. But the Games also gave her the chance to see what was happening behind the scenes, offering a glimpse into the immense operations and impressive logistics of live production and showing her a different part of the creative process.

The skills Tan gained — teamwork, communication, confidence, adaptability, work ethic, and critical thinking — in addition to the technical expertise she developed beyond what she could do holding a camera, gave her a wider perspective and introduced new career options. The experience also affirmed what Tan already knew: She loved being in a diverse, vibrant setting, working creatively and collaboratively in a multicultural context on a global scale.

Tan says she was hesitant about working in the tech industry, or the corporate world generally. In fact, when a recruiter contacted her in 2022 about a role at Adobe, she thought it was a mistake. “At first, I thought they got the wrong person, to be honest,” she says with a laugh. “But I was like, I do know the company and the products from using them so much, so I’ll go for this just for practice.” Tan had an interview, was immediately offered the position, and accepted it.

Tan started as a partner operations manager, coordinating B2B communications and operations for partnerships with Adobe’s flagship video products. Nine months later, she transitioned to the role of partner manager. Last December, she took on her current role, and her focus shifted more toward outreach, new partnership opportunities, and the product ecosystem strategy for Adobe Creative Cloud video applications, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and others.

“I was very grateful and humbled by the fact that, although my background wasn’t necessarily in tech and definitely not in product, my team gave me the chance to prove myself,” she says. “My job today is different from what I started out doing, which was more partnership operations, and now it’s actually managing a lot of the partners and making key strategic decisions. But my team has been such a backbone, just to call out what they thought I was capable of and be able to adjust my role accordingly.”

Tan talks enthusiastically about the work she’s been “entrusted by the team to do” — from speaking at industry events and authoring customer stories to prioritizing which partners to talk to and leveraging partnerships for co-marketing opportunities or workflow co-innovation ideas. Just like she’s always done, Tan is leaning on her curiosity, creativity, empathy, and human connection to build relationships and solve problems for people.

“I’m someone who knows the products and can relate to customers, having been in their shoes,” she says, recalling her days using Adobe digital audio and video post-production tools in school and since then. “And that helps me figure out how to meet them where they’re at.”

As Tan says, Adobe benefits from its hundreds of partners that complete workflows to satisfy its customers — so she needs to know who to engage with, and in what ways, to do that effectively.

“Our team is advocating on behalf of customers and from the ecosystem angle every day, handling problems [others are] not dealing with every day,” she says, comparing the internal-external interaction to communicating with rights-holding broadcasters at the Olympics. “Whenever you’re working with things that internal teams are unfamiliar with and you’re advocating internally for it, there’s always going to be some resistance to that.

“Being able to take the information and tell a story with it, which resonates internally and with executives, is a skill that I feel like I’m developing and will carry with me throughout my career. It’s that ability to embrace difference, find the narrative, connect the dots, and relate it to a business objective that ultimately does benefit the customer.”

Working at Adobe has been gratifying for many reasons, Tan says, from its culture of creativity and innovation to its commitment to diversity and inclusion. She believes Adobe truly values different backgrounds and perspectives.

“As a company, I would say Adobe is committed to diversity, and a lot of those values that are talked about in employee meetings — it’s not just talk. I see it actually play out,” Tan says. “I’ve felt very seen here and I do think there’s a lot that Adobe values and espouses that is rare to find at a tech company.

“[Diversity] matters a ton, and especially in a corporate setting when so much of the job is navigating the internal world of Adobe, I think that element really matters.”

Tan says the team she’s on now is “one of the most diverse” she’s seen in her career.

“That brings not only diversity in terms of culture and background but also diversity of thought,” she says. “I would say that has definitely been a catalyst for growth in our team, and it’s helped with the visibility that we’ve been able to achieve. I would give a lot of credit to my manager for leaning into difference instead of shutting it down. I think that definitely makes the breeding ground for ideas and innovation so much more possible.”

From the Olympics to Adobe: Impact, alignment, and a “very rewarding” human story

Years ago, before covering two Olympics as a photographer, and when she aspired to be in the media and make movies, Tan told herself she’d never work in big tech. It wasn’t what she wanted to do. But her work at Adobe, she says, shaped by her skills and experiences from the Games, has been “more fulfilling” than she ever expected.

“Being on the other side of the fence here, I’ve realized that I’m still capable of impact and influence in a different way,” Tan says. “It’s been huge, and I don't regret the decision at all — I’ve really enjoyed working in a corporate setting.

“I think it depends on your team and where you’re situated, but it has aligned really well with my past in a way that I didn’t foresee and it’s been very rewarding.”

Tan has seen the Olympic production from the inside and watched the broadcast from the outside. She says that what makes the Games so compelling, time after time, is their power to bring people together.

“It’s that human element, the human story, being able to see that triumph on the screen,” she says. “It unites people across countries, having something to cheer for — it unifies the human spirit. I think, at the end of the day, that’s what the Olympics stand for.

“It sounds lofty, but it really is like the whole world is watching the Games, and sports have the ability to unify people beyond logic and beyond laws. It’s an opportunity to build bridges, which makes us more human.”