Helene Alexander Pollak was born in Breslau, in Lower Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland), and her family lived in Hamburg and then emigrated to Chile in 1939 to escape the Nazis.
She studied piano under the Montessori system of music and received a diploma in 1942 for teaching and worked with youth and disabled children while developing an interest in composition.
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and lived for several years in Paris and Cologne.
In her later years, she composed several "hörspiel" pieces, or "plays for listening", several of them for the WDR Radio of Cologne.
[2][3] Alexander's compositions were mainly instrumental and were performed by orchestras in countries including Chile, Italy, France and the United States.