Ursula Reuter Christiansen was born in 1943 and comes from Trier, Germany. She lives and works in Denmark. She studied literature at the Philipp University in Marburg, Germany, and later, in 1969, graduated from the Akademie der Künste in Düsseldorf, where she studied sculpture under Joseph Beuys. She married the Danish composer Henning Christiansen (1932–2008), and in 1969 the couple settled in Askeby on the Danish island of Møn, where Ursula Reuter Christiansen still lives and works today. There she was an active participant in the feminist movement and social critique prevalent in the 1970s, and she also invested her political commitment in her art. Reuter Christiansen was a professor at the art academy in Hamburg (HfBK) from 1992–97 and professor of painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1997 to 2006. She represented Denmark at the 2001 Venice Biennial alongside Henning Christiansen.