[1] She was born in Berlin as the daughter of portrait painter Gustav Graef and Franziska Liebreich (1824–1893), a lithographer.

In 1935 she published a book about their friendship in which she attributed her brother Botho's fatal heart attack to the news of her son's death.

Lepsius exhibited her work at the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey, August Endell and Rainer Maria Rilke were among those who attended.

Most of her approximately 280 portraits were of people in the Jewish community and were lost or destroyed during World War II.