Baumgartner studied at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, from 1988 to 1994 before completing her master's degree in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London in 1999.
She has said that she is "interested in woodcut for conceptual reasons and not just for the love of the material...it's about bringing together the different mediums of the video still and the woodcut, about combining the first and the latest reproduction techniques to produce an image...."[3] She first came to public attention in the UK in EAST international[4] in 2004 with her print Shack and a year later with a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
[6] In 2009 she received the Teresa Bulgarini Prize[7] for her woodcuts which deal with concepts of time, motion, velocity and acceleration.
She began her three-month stay with an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Hanoi, Holzschnitt im digitalen Zeitalter (woodcut in the digital age) and finished with a tour around the country's art schools, sharing her experience in the art of woodcut.
Her work was subject to a traveling retrospective in 2014–2015, with exhibitions at the Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image Imprimée in La Louviere, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva; it was accompanied by the first oeuvre catalog in her career.