In 1985, she completed her Master of Science in Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture; two years later, Lentz received her PhD in sociology from the University of Hannover.

[5] See also:[3] In the years that followed, she worked as research assistant of the regional group 'Africa and Europe' at the Institute of Anthropology, Free University of Berlin.

Between October 2012 and July 2013, she was fellow at the international research centre 'Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History' at Humboldt University, Berlin.

In spring 2019, she held a two-month fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, participating in a research group on the new middle class in Africa.

[11] Since October 2019, she has held the position of senior research professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.

Between 1997 and 2005, she regularly conducted fieldwork in Southern Burkina Faso, exploring topics including settlement history, land rights, ethnicity and the politics of belonging with the aim to do comparative research with North-Western Ghana.

[6] From 2005 onward, Lentz conducted further fieldwork in Ghana in the context of the research project 'States at Work', funded by Volkswagen Foundation.

[18] In 2006, she supervised the fieldwork of a group of Master's students on work at police stations, courts and schools in Upper West Region, Ghana.

In that context she also conducted her own research on the history and the contemporary situation of educational elite(s) and the newly emerging middle class in Northern Ghana.

[19] Between 2009 and 2013, Lentz coordinated a doctoral research group that explored the politics of memory and national-day celebrations in Africa as part of the programme 'PRO Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften 2015' at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.