Born in Amsterdam, Babs Haenen worked as a professional dancer prior to studying visual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy from 1974 to 1979. She went on to develop a reputation for her expressive and impressionistic ceramics which blur the line between sculpture and painting, deftly combining line, color, and form. Haenen works with colored porcelain slabs, layering them with pigment and then folding, cutting, and sculpting them to create organic, dynamic vessels. Movement and touch are important to her process and she developed her own special technique to fade colors into one another with no sharp lines.

Haenen taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy from 1994 until 2013 and has received numerous grants and awards, including the 1991 Inax Design Prize for Europeans and the 2020 van Achterbergh Prize. Her work can be found in prestigious collections around the world such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art in Shigaraki, Japan, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.