Discriminant feature extraction plays a central role in pattern recognition and classification. In this paper, we propose the tensor linear Laplacian discrimination (TLLD) algorithm for extracting discriminant features from tensor data. TLLD is an extension of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and linear Laplacian discrimination (LLD) in directions of both nonlinear subspace learning and tensor representation. Based on the contextual distance, the weights for the within-class scatters and the between-class scatter can be determined to capture the principal structure of data clusters. This makes TLLD free from the metric of the sample space, which may not be known. Moreover, unlike LLD, the parameter tuning of TLLD is very easy. Experimental results on face recognition, texture classification and handwritten digit recognition show that TLLD is effective in extracting discriminative features.