[13] Other notable photographers who also graduated from Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam include Ger van Elk, Rineke Dijkstra, Peter Klashorst, Dana Lixenberg and Antonín Kratochvil.

Five years out of art school, van Meene was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize (2001) and signed with New York's Matthew Marks gallery.

In the 2007 series, Going my Own Way Home, van Meene photographed residents of an impoverished neighbourhood in the post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, focusing more on the cultural and economic context of her subjects than in her previous works.

[15] Van Meene is quoted as saying that she finds beauty in the “unpolished, still evolving” adolescent girls and “the tension between her subjects’ their childlike awkwardness and their near-adult bodies.” [15] Some publications have noted the “innocently erotic” element that is present in these photographs.

[18] Van Meene's portraits are distinguishable by the detached appearance of her subjects and her style that straddles the border between creating a fantasy world and documenting contemporary youth.

From 1995-1998, van Meene worked on a collection called “Series Blanc” which featured a girl in a transparent white lace dress, lacking undergarments.

The magazine is quoted as saying that “captured in van Meene’s work is the less stylized [than kitsch or anime] (but still stylish) vernacular of everyday Japanese girlhood.

It is a look at once fashionable and ingenious, tender but not without the occasional flush of teenage allure.”[16] Van Meene approached adolescent girls on the street in Tokyo and photographed them against nearby backdrops.

[17] The photographic documentation is used to frame a “performance event” as a constructed space, but one that provokes an emotional response to the staged scenario without context or commentary by the artist.

Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions like the Biennale for Architecture in Venice (2000), Fotografen in Nederland een Anthologie at Gemeente Museum Den Haag (2002), In Sight: Contemporary Dutch Photography from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum at The Art Institute of Chicago (2005), Family Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), Paris Photo in Carrousel du Louvre in Paris (2008), Faces in the Nederlands Fotomusem in Rotterdam (2015) and at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, the Marc Foxx Gallery in LA, Le Case d’Arte in Milan, Galleria Laura Pecci in Milan, Galiere Paul Andiresse in Amsterdam and The Photographer's Gallery in London.

Though critics noted that this controversy was misplaced, it is understood that van Meene's photographs have an underlying sexual element to them and can create an uneasiness within the viewer.

[25] In 2016, Van Meene was one of the recipients of the Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship, which is awarded to distinguished people within the science or fine art of photography.