She was born in Parma in 1959 and spent his childhood in Rome and in various foreign countries, Turkey, Libya and Spain. She studied at the DAMS in Bologna and in 1986 founded Lenz Rifrazioni in Parma, together with Francesco Pititto – since 2015 Lenz Fondazione - theater of multidisciplinary experiments engaged in continuous and rigorous investigative work on contemporary stage language.
Lenz's creations run through the dramaturgy and founding works of Western culture, retranscribing its poetic drives into regenerating performative actions and powerful visual transfers: Büchner, Lenz, Mayakovsky, Hölderlin, Kleist, Shakespeare, Goethe, Grimm, Calderón, Andersen, Genet, Ovid, Virgil, D'Annunzio, Eliot, Bacchini, Manzoni, Verdi, Ariosto, Dante, Euripides, Aeschylus, Pasolini, Pane, the Holy Scriptures, Homer are the works and authors investigated in large multi-year monographic projects.
In an aesthetic convergence between exegetical fidelity to the word of the text, visual radicality of filmic creation, originality and conceptual extremism of artistic installation, Lenz's works rewrite philosophical tensions and aesthetic anxieties of the present in visionary signs. From the beginning of the 2000s, plastic research became central to Maestri's creative process: the acting score was wedged between writing in images and the material re-invention of space, which exceeded the functional limits of the scenographic system to become an artistic work not subordinated to the performative action. Since the 1910s her work has been characterized by a broader and more complex installation action which leads her to create, in close dialogue with the vibrant imagoturgies of Francesco Pititto and the sound design of various musicians on the international electronic scene - Andrea Azzali, Lillevan, Robin Rimbaud, Claudio Rocchetti - site-specific performative and visual environments in important architectural and monumental complexes.
The installations are performed by heterogeneous ensembles made up of sensitive actors, children, elderly people, dancers, musicians, singers, engaged in the scenic transcription of composite textual structures, in which musical and theatrical dramaturgy are stratified and merged in formal and conceptual association.
Since 1996 she has been co-artistic director of the international Natura Dèi Teatri Festival, a thematic project of contemporary performing arts; from 2022 the festival starts a new design phase and becomes a Field of Aesthetic Parentele, a research space for new creative practices activated by artists of different disciplinary backgrounds and by the reflections of curators and scholars of the contemporary scene.
She directs the training program of the Theater Practices workshops - a two-year course aimed at young actors and dancers - and Social Theater Practices, differentiated theater awareness courses aimed at intellectually and mentally disabled people, people with sensory disabilities, former inmates in judicial psychiatric hospitals, people with pathological addictions. Since 2015, together with Francesco Pititto, she has curated the Permanent Theatrical Research Project on the themes of the Resistance and the Holocaust.
She is invited to hold talks, courses, seminars, workshops in various universities and international events, including the University of Parma, IUAV Venice, Alma Mater Bologna, Orientale di Napoli, University of Trento, Quadrennial of Prague.
From 2010 to the present, she has designed the composition, installation and costumes of: Hamlet at the Rocca di San Secondo, the Royal Palace of Colorno and the Teatro Farnese in Parma; Aeneis and Aeneis in Italy, a two-year project created in collaboration with international electronic musicians; the contemporary macro-installation of The Betrothed; the scenography and costumes of Verdi Re Lear. Francesco Pititto's Opera che non c'è regia for the Verdi Festival; Hyperion #1, #2, #3, trilogy inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion, author explored in a long monographic project created in the nineties and This weak force musical and performative work taken from the Choirs of Oedipus the Tyrant in Hölderlin's translation, installed in the room of the Veleia Statues of the Archaeological Museum of Parma for the Prometheus-Louis Nono Project of the Teatro Regio of Parma; the installation of the two-year project dedicated to Orlando Furioso in unconventional spaces in Parma and its province - Rasori Pavilion of the Ospedale Maggiore in Parma, Temple of the Cremation of Valera, Guatelli Museum; the installation and direction of Autodafé based on Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo in the Ex Napoleonic Prison of San Francesco; Paradiso. A sacred piece by Dante and Verdi in the immense spaces of the North Bridge and Verdi Macbeth in the ex-industrial Lenz Theater - special commissions of the Verdi Festival; the Purgatory set up in the ancient Cruise of the Old Hospital concludes the research on Dante's Divine Comedy. Dedicated to the contemporary rereading of the works of Calderón de la Barca are the creations of the project The Imminent Past: The Great Theater of the World and La Vida es Sueño in the Pilotta Monumental Complex; the direction and installation of the triptych Flowers like stars?, Other State (invited in 2021 to the Venice Theater Biennale), Violent Hipógrifo, presented at the Farnese Theatre; Life is a dream installed in the perimeter of the medieval Abbey of Valserena - home of the Communication Study Center and Archive - special production for Parma 2020+21 Italian Capital of Culture; the diptych on Iphigenia and the Oresteia trilogy, a contemporary reflection on the death of tragedy.
In 2021, the dramaturgical research opened up to the Holy Scriptures and was divided into a four-year project: Creation from Haydn's work and Milton's Paradise Lost, Numbers from Book IV of the Bible performed by Marcello Sambati, Apocalypse from the Evangelist John, a large site-specific installation in an industrial archaeology complex, and finally, in 2024, Gnostic Apocalypses, the culmination of the journey into the mystery of humanity's destiny.
In 2023 the composition of Crine_Ermengarda oratorio dall'Adelchi by Alessandro Manzoni.
In 2023 he curated a multi-year poetic rewilding project entitled Haiku_Dove prima era in its declinations Bosco, Acqua, Aria, Roccia to re-imagine the nature that disappeared in cities and to restore the memory of the lost environment, through the power of the verses of Bacchini and other beloved poets.
In 2024 he created a performative iconostasis inspired by the work of Gina Pane, the most extreme figure of the performance-body art movement, entitled Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions presented in the exhibition 'From Dadaism to Poor Art. Contemporary art in Parma's private collections, at the exhibition space of Palazzo del Governatore.
In 2025, for the project of performative transcriptions of works by female artists, she created Over Leonora Carrington_Distrazioni, a site-specific composition for the Sala Steccata of the Governor's Palace. An exclusively installation process continues with Piccine and Bruno Longhi_Le Sorelle site-specific installations for the Parma City Council Chamber as part of the permanent project on the Resistance and the Holocaust. Also in 2025, the re-edition of Questa febble forza from Hölderlin's Choirs of Oedipus the Tyrant and in dialogue with Verdi's musical opera, he conducted Disdemona dall'Otello and the writings of Simone Weil for the 2025 Verdi Festival.