Susan Hensel received her BFA from University of Michigan in 1972 with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. Her continued study includes Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Penland, Christies Education, Praxis Center for Aesthetic studies among others. She has a history, to date, of well over 300 exhibitions, 38 of them solo, 28 garnering awards. Upcoming, Susan has 2-person and group exhibitions scheduled with the Howard County Art Council, Ellicot, MD, Artistry, Bloomington, MN and the Garrett Museum of Art, Garrett, Indiana.

Hensel's artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts , University of Washington, Baylor University and University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artists books are available at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.

Her new innovative work that blends commercial embroidery processes with sculptural concerns is gaining attention and awards in the US with inroads into Europe. Susan’s knowledge of materials makes it possible for her to create small to large scale hard edge sculpture from soft fabrics that paradoxically keep their crisp form with minimal armatures. Her knowledge of the physics of color allows her to create shape-shifting displays employing the special reflective characteristics of embroidery thread.

In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board,Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Ragdale Foundation.

Hensel's curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis. The Susan Hensel Gallery continues on Artsy.net as an online project promoting Midwest artists with a particular interest in materiality. Hensel has curated over eighty exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.