During a career spanning six decades she worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and costumes for theatre and dance, sound-art installations, mixed-media environments, music and performance art.

Suzuki’s weekly afternoon lectures on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University together with composers Earle Brown, John Cage and Morton Feldman and Jackson Mac Low, artists Ray Johnson, and Isamu Noguchi, often followed by a soirée at her 57th Street studio.

Through Noguchi, she befriended the industrial designer Isamu Kenmochi, who wrote that, "Her work has great vision, grandeur rather than beauty: overwhelming by the vigorous power flowing forth from within ... poetry wrung from the body.

In 1977 Dienes helped establish the downtown pub, The Ear Inn with Rip Hayman and Paco Underhill, which became her New York City home base.

A three-month trip to Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah in 1947 had a profound effect on Dienes' aesthetic, as she later recalled: 'Experiencing the natural formations as pieces of sculpture changed my whole attitude to life, to art.

'[4] The stark beauty of the desert landscape, together with her studies of Zen Buddhism, allowed her to see the artistic potential in her surroundings, inspiring her to assemble works of art from found materials.

The New York Times review of her show at the Carlebach Gallery in April 1948 noted the inclusion of ‘ingenious surrealist shock objects composed of driftwood and sea shell fragments’.

Reviewing her exhibition Found Objects and Constructions at Mills College in The Village Voice in February 1956 John Wilcock listed some of the components of her sculptures: ‘a rusty garbage-can lid, considerably battered; chips off a pine cone which look like ducks on a pond, a mannequin’s leg in a whiskey bottle topped with a seashell; about one-third of a shovel, which looks like a bird; an automobile hubcap, dented by passing trucks; innumerable pieces of well-rounded charred driftwood, burned orange crates, and scorched easels; and an enormous sheet of rusted metal (“we had to cart it home in a taxi”) which resembles a map of ancient Egypt.’[6] In 1956 Dienes began to construct complex assemblages of glass bottles held together with epoxy resin, which she called 'Bottle Gardens'.

In 1964 Dienes created an assemblage on a grand scale in her mixed-media installation A Surrounding at the Smolin Gallery, New York, a labyrinth of plastic sheeting, netting, charred wood, ropes, lighting elements and a zebra skin.

Reviewing an exhibition of Dienes' work at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco in 1957, noted critic Alfred Frankenstein described her rubbings as follows: 'A circular saw and various spiky forms lead to a sunflower as eloquent as any of Van Gogh's, but most of the pictures are not as specifically representational as that.

Manhole covers, perforated steel plates, boards, sidewalk grilles and other surfaces have been drawn upon for a series of designs laying stress on the movement of rectilinear and circular forms and on exquisitely sensitive resonances of color and tone.

Dienes was closely associated with many of the artists around Fluxus, including Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, and collaborated on numerous musical performances and theatrical events.

Throughout the 1970s she contributed works to the Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York organized by Charlotte Moorman, and collaborated with Charlie Morrow, Simone Forti, Rip Hayman, Jackson MacLow, Pauline Oliveros and Alison Knowles.

Dienes continued to experiment with materials into her seventies and eighties, exploring such divergent paths as the emergent colour Xerox technology and painting on snow.