[2] She attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she studied under Stuart Saunders Smith, Herbert Brün, and William Moersch.
[3][4] She then received a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Steven Schick.
[5][6][7] After her graduation from UC San Diego, Hennies relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2003, and started collaborating with the guitarist Aaron Russell in the group Weird Weeds.
[5][8][6][9] Hennies went through a gender transition in 2015 and much of her artwork reflects some aspects of her experience as a transgender woman.
[5] Her audio-visual work Contralto was premiered in 2017, featuring transfeminine identity issues[5][10][11] and was nominated for the Queer|Art Prize in 2019.