Lena Zieses self-understanding as an artist arises from her practice at the intersection of art and its educational potentials. As an artist and teacher, she questions the methods and possibilities of art from different perspectives and fields of practice.
As an artist and arts educator, her work has included the following contexts: after studying art and politics in Kassel and Berlin in the 1990s, she worked primarily as an artist and exhibited internationally. In addition to running the exhibition space Jet am Alexanderplatz in Berlin from 2005 to 2010, she was an artistic assistant in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Kassel.
From 2011 to 2012, she was junior professor for art, design and its mediation at the Bauhaus University Weimar and from 2012 to 2018 professor for art education at the HFBK Hamburg. Together with Susanne Weiß, she curated, among others, the exhibition Right Brain Problems for the Heidelberger Kunstverein (2013), the exhibition Stuart Sherman & Babette Mangolte: Spectacles at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg and the symposium Zwischen den Bildern for the Brücke-Museum Berlin (2019). As a mediator for the New Clients Initiative, she developed a 12-village artistic project for a community in Brandenburg from 2019 to 2021 with citizens from Steinhöfel, the theater collective Rimini Protokoll, and the design and architecture network Constructlab. Since 2019, Lena Ziese has been a professor of liberal arts and art education at AdBK Nürnberg. Her engagement is shaped by politics of play and practices of unlearning.
