She came from a noted family,[2] the daughter of Maria Elisabetha (née Kahlow[3]) and Georg Lisiewski (1674–1751), a Berlin portrait painter of Polish stock who arrived in Prussia in 1692 as part of the retinue of the court architect Johann Friedrich Eosander von Göthe [sv].

She made lucrative commissions from her works and eventually received royal patronage, after many letters of introduction from her patrons in Paris, Italy, Germany, and Prussia.

[5] Anna Dorothea married Berlin innkeeper Ernst Friedrich Therbusch (1711–1773) in 1742[3] and gave up painting until around 1760 to help her husband in the restaurant.

[5] The Swing and Game of Shuttlecock (Neues Palais, Potsdam) are a pair of conversation pieces that defined her first period of work.

Therbusch's first recorded return to painting was in 1761 in the Stuttgart court of Duke Karl Eugen.

The French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture displayed her work first, proudly supporting a female artist.

Denis Diderot, the controversial and outspoken art critic and philosopher, was sympathetic to her, even to the point of posing naked for her.

[9][10] Anna Dorothea was elected as a member of the Académie Royale in 1767,[3] lived with Diderot and met famous artists,[11] and even painted Philipp Hackert[1] but she remained unsuccessful in Paris.

[14] She died in Berlin on 9 November 1782 at the age of 61,[3] and was buried at Dorotheenstadt cemetery, whose pertaining church was destroyed in World War II.