Hamilton was born in Los Angeles, California but spent most of her childhood in
Stony Brook, New York on the
north shore of Long Island. Her father, Ira Winslow Hamilton, Jr., hailed from
Bessemer, Alabama, and her mother, the former Eleanor Albertine "Tina" Blackwell, was from
Meridian, Mississippi. Both parents graduated from historically black colleges—Tina attended
Talladega while Ira went to
Morehouse—and they both became successful professionals. Ira worked for a while as an engineer and then went into business as a general contractor. Tina eventually earned a master's degree in social work and worked for the
Girl Scouts for many years. Hamilton fell in love with theater at an early age. During the 1970s, she saw several
off-Broadway productions by the
Negro Ensemble Company, including ''
A Soldier's Story and The First Breeze of Summer''. She enrolled in
Carnegie Mellon University to study theater, but after a year was accepted into
New York University's Tisch Drama School where she earned a Bachelor of
Fine Arts in
Theater in 1985. She then pursued graduate studies at
The Juilliard School where she earned a M.A. in drama in 1989. ==Career==