Malen's father, Philip J. Levitt, was a music critic and several uncles were artists, including the printmaker Edwin Kaufman and the Works Projects Administration painter Lionel Stern.

[6][7][8] Beginning in 1998, Malen's interest in games inspired a series of site-specific works and artists' books that engaged the viewer as a direct participant.

Her book Opportunity Knocks (1998), produced to coincide with an exhibition at Rutgers University, was described by critic Nancy Princenthal in Art on Paper (1998) as having a "distinctive blend of urgency and fatalism played for laughs.

Other game-based projects include "Magnetic Map" (1999),[10] created for Art in General New York; "The Lottery" (1999), an exhibition she curated for Rotunda in Brooklyn; and illustrated short stories for France-Fiction, Paris.

In 1999, Malen initiated the ongoing project The New Society for Universal Harmony, a fictive reinvention of La Société de l'harmonie universelle, founded by Franz Mesmer in Paris in 1784.

The New Society produces Malen's collaborative projects such as La Société de l'harmonie universelle, Harmony as a Hive, and I am the Animal, all of which explore utopian themes.

[24] Toward the end of Malen's CUE Art Foundation exhibition, she presented a live performance that explored the social structure of the beehive as a model of utopia.

[25] A three-channel immersive video installation, I Am The Animal, Part II attempts to reverse anthropomorphism by re-imagining human culture as a hive through the co-mingling of historic, documentary and mass-media footage.

In every format Eden, the cautionary tale, is made newly relevant by the ticking clock of climate change, habitat loss and extinction.

In the review Ann McCoy states "In Scenes from Paradise we return to Eden for a course correction, we have forgotten that we share the same web of life for survival.

"[4] In Artforum (January 2017) the art critic Nicholas Chittenden Morgan wrote: "Understanding language as political, Malen presents inter-species relationships without sentimentality.