In her lifetime, Helen Lieros was considered more than a visual artist. For over five decades, she trained and mentored generations of Zimbabwean artists, advocating for a form of local contemporary art that resisted limiting colonial institutional aesthetics. A daughter of Greek immigrants, H. Lieros was born and raised in Gweru, a small agrarian town in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. She began working just as the racial tension in Zimbabwe was boiling over, leading to the Second Chimurenga War of Independence (1964–1979). H. Lieros was perceived by many as anti-establishment and her work was underpinned by a sense of struggle. Through her art, she wrestled with her complex identity as a white African woman. Her Greco-Zimbabwean heritage gave her a sense of multiplicity. In her work, she juxtaposed, fused together and dissected elements of her dual identity to highlight the ritual, beliefs, ceremonies and histories of both Greece and Zimbabwe, notably by using zoomorphic motifs whose symbolism was particular to both places.

Having felt suffocated by British colonial art tutelage in Zimbabwe, H. Lieros was forever grateful for the awards and opportunities that enabled her to temporarily leave her country of birth. She received a Diploma and Arts Degree with Honours at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, Switzerland where she studied from 1958 to 1962. She was awarded First Prize by the Association of Women Artists in 1960. During her studies, H. Lieros visited Greece and other European countries to further explore her heritage, which she notably saw reflected in Cycladic and Byzantine artworks. An outstanding student, in 1963 H. Lieros was also awarded a scholarship to attend the Istituto Statale d’Arte in Florence, Italy for further study, where she focused on mural art. This was fitting preparation for her 1967 mural commission at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Harare. Upon returning home, her colour palette extended, and became more vivid as she combined the religious iconography and expanded visual lexicon drawn from Europe, with the sensitivity, soul and resourcefulness that Zimbabwe offered her. Nearly thirty years later, she began painting majestic murals at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Archangels Michael and Gabriel in Maputo, Mozambique, working on them in the years 1996 to 2002, 2008 to 2009 and in 2013.

After her studies, H. Lieros returned to Gweru, where she taught at Chaplin High School between 1964 and 1967. In 1966 she married British-born Derek Huggins (1940–2021). In 1967 they moved to Harare, where H. Lieros continued her practice and had her first solo show at The Antique Shop in the city centre. The couple were key to the establishment of the diverse and multi-disciplinary collective The Circle in 1972. In 1975 the ethos of The Circle inspired D. Huggins and H. Lieros to launch Gallery Delta, whose name was derived from the Greek alphabet – a reference to H. Lieros’ heritage. Just like its co-founder, Gallery Delta could not be described in a singular manner: it was a gathering space, a knowledge production site, a publishing house and a cross-disciplinary community centre that supported the local art ecosystem through exhibitions, theatre, concerts and the like.

Zimbabwe gained its Independence in 1980, and a year later H. Lieros became the first artist to win the President’s Award of Honour, for a painting entitled The Rise of the Jongwe I (1981). In 1985, H. Lieros returned to Geneva to perfect her craft and focused on printmaking at the Centre génevois de gravure contemporaine.

H. Lieros exhibited widely on the local and international scenes, participating in the Havana Biennale in 1986 and the 1st Johannesburg Biennale in 1995. Her first retrospective was held in 1991 at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Despite poor eyesight, H. Lieros was still actively teaching and painting when she passed away in July 2021 in Harare. In the same year, H. Lieros was named a National Arts Merit Awards Legend by the National Arts Council of Zimbabwe.