Queen Pictoria, born April Li Lankford, is a 5th generation American woman of
Scott-Irish decent. She was born in San Francisco and raised in a working
middle-class family in California’s Central Valley. Ms. Lankford’s family spent nearly all their time working to pay the bills. In 1967, at age 11, she began washing dishes in her parents’ truck stop along Sacramento’s Highway 50 during the freeway's completion between Sacramento and Placerville. For the next 7 years she learned the labor-intensive nature of the restaurant business. She learned at an early age how to serve and talk with truck drivers from all over the country, and developed endurance for working long hours. By age 18, she was looking for a way out.

Drawn to dramatic arts, Ms. Lankford dreamed of opening a vaudeville house in an old movie theatre in a little town called Walnut Grove, located in Sacramento’s Delta. All of that changed when in 1973, after graduating from high school, Lankford found her first job in television. She worked free as an intern at Sacramento’s KTXL, Channel 40, running studio camera for local shows such as “Big Time Wrestling”, and a country western music program called “Forty Grand”.

After landing her first TV paying job in the summer of ’73, Lankford began a television career that would last 28 years. Primed by the hopes and dreams of her mother and grandmother, Lankford was ready to enter a workforce that up until then had been traditionally “men’s work”.

After being trained as a news photographer, over course of her life, she would operate and shoot news stories using many different field video cameras. Having “grown up” with electronic field video, Lankford’s living came from her continued development of skills as a video engineer and news photographer.

At a time when news film was being phased out by field video, those with “hired seniority” still desired the smaller, more compact film cameras over the newer, cumbersome, cable-yoked field video cameras. Since Lankford was low in seniority, and a woman photographer who had not earned her place in the man’s work world, she was usually given the heavy, unwanted newer technology. As a result, she used some of the very first color portable video cameras developed. Beginning in 1976, she handled and became acquainted with prototypes and many cameras that were the results of research and development of field video.

Though unpleasant because of their often-poor construction, and lacking then what would later become great recording capability, Lankford had no choice but to learn all she could about every camera that was placed in her hands. Technology went from single-tube cameras, to three-tube cameras with different types of light capturing qualities, to chip cameras that came along in the mid-‘80’s. Recording techniques went from what would today be considered a much cruder analog method, on up to current technology with the refinement and fine-tuning of digital video.

“We used to talk about how it would be great to take a video ‘freeze-frame’ and make it into a still photograph,” she says. But back then still video frames smeared and lacked definition. Ms. Lankford finds the present technology of digital cameras unsurpassed by anything preceding it in electronic photography.

Ms. Lankford has been a local musician, a waitress, an entrepreneur, a bookkeeper, an option trader, a network marketer, a cyclist and hiker, and an animal rescue advocate. She has an impassioned love for history of The Civil War, The West, and The Antiquities.

Having worked in both local and network news, she has covered events and stories up and down the Western United States from San Francisco to Seattle to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska; down the West Coast to LA, and the Deserts of the Southwest.

Thought by some to be too independent, Lankford has learned to side-step most political circles (both in and out of business) in order to maintain her interest in living and creative freedom. Most of her career was spent as a freelance television news photographer and sound engineer, always finding more security in working for herself. “The cutting edge of women in the work force can get pretty sharp,” she says. “It can be a lonely place, especially if you are half-good at what you do and don’t want to play games.”

In May of 2001, April Lankford retired from television and is now living in both Seattle and Northern California where she has committed much of her energy to writing and teaching.