De Henriquez was born in Trieste to a father descended from Spanish noblemen of the Habsburg court in Vienna; her mother was of Turkish and Russian origin.
De Henriquez was born intersex with ambiguous genitalia, and declared herself "proud to be hermaphrodite" and "two people inside one body".
Towards the end of the 1970s, she began to travel in East Asia, and carried out commissions for clients in Japan and Hong Kong.
She also worked in other areas of sculpture, such as the monumental fountain of dolphins which was erected in a courtyard at the World Intellectual Property Organization headquarters in Geneva.
[6] De Henriquez's gender identity informed much of her work, with its recurring motifs of paired heads, conjoined figures, and ambiguous mythological creatures.