Tine Steen, born in 1965 in Darmstadt, studied painting in Paris, Rotterdam, and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. She now lives in Berlin, where she works artistically with textile masks and busts, exploring the construction and perception of identity through the human face. In 1994, she collaborated with architect Klaus Schlosser on the Jewish memorial at the Buchenwald Memorial site.

She turned to comics in 2020, when her visual practice led her to develop a desire to tell more complex stories. In 2025, her non-fiction comic "The Cooking Apes" was published, exploring the origins of humankind through the lens of cooking. The project was a finalist for the Leibinger Foundation Comic Prize in 2023.