Professor Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with colleagues Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers, of a volume of art writing from the Arab world in translation: Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Her article “Abstraction of the Many? Finding Plenitude in Arab Painting,” for Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab world, 1950s-1980s (2020), won the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation Prize for a Critical Essay on Contemporary Art.
Professor Lenssen has been engaged in several curatorial collaborations. Most recently, in 2025, Lenssen worked with Stefania Pandolfo and the members of the Syrian film collective Abounaddara on an exhibition titled Abounaddara:The Ruins We Carry at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2024, Lenssen and a team of students organized Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization for the Brown Gallery of Doe Library. In 2023, she was a consulting scholar for the exhibition A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran at The Drawing Center in New York.
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