A Bolshevik, in the twenties she became famous for her proletarian theatre troupes for children and agitprop in Soviet Russia and Latvia.

[1] In 1922 she moved to Germany where she got to know Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, to whom she introduced the ideas of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

In 1924 she met the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin in Capri, and the duo would have an intermittent affair for the next several years as he visited her in Moscow and Riga.

Lācis was released and returned to Soviet Latvia in 1948[3] and spent her old age together with her husband, the German theatre critic Bernhard Reich.

From 1948 to 1957 she was the main director of Valmiera Drama Theatre and used the leftist avant-garde techniques in her stage productions.