Strasbourg, France, 1965.

While González-Foerster was studying at the École du Magasin of the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, she worked as a security guard at a museum in Grenoble. Afterwards, she studied in the Institute des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. She began her career as an artist in the 1990s, focusing on cinema, and taking up an interest in landscaping and literature. Since her early work in the eighties until today, she has continued to delve into the idea of space as a means for revelation and of time as one of her closest allies. These concepts form the backbone of her artistic journey.

She works with video screenings, photography and spatial installations, her first films being short, minimalist and dreamlike. Inspired by cinema, literature, Modernist architecture and the history of art, her work is often characteristic for a calm, intimate interrogation of modern urban life. She intends for her installations to encourage people to interact with them. Indeed, she proposes a journey through which the onlooker travels to spaces and times where what is imaginary mixes with what is real, and where literature sets the patterns to follow to inhabit that dreamlike world, thereby taking the work of art beyond the meaning of objects Literature and theatre are strategies used to set up an imaginary world in which physical space is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg that the onlooker traces out with both its fictitious and real coordinates.

She was awarded a residential stay for artists in Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto, in 1996, the Mies van der Rohe Award the same year and the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2002 in Paris.

She lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro.