Teresa Lanceta graduated from the Universidad de Barcelona with a degree in modern and contemporary history, and obtained a doctorate in art history at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid (1998). She has taught at the Alicante Escuela de Arquitectura (2006–2011) and the Escola Massana in Barcelona (2013–2020). She has lived and worked in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Marrakech, La Palma, the city of Alicante and Mutxamel in the province of Alicante, where she currently resides.

At the beginning of the 1970s, T. Lanceta chose textile-making as her means of artistic expression, confronting the supposed boundary between what was considered art and what was deprecated as handicraft. In addition to questions of formal exploration and material and technical issues, she is interested in the traditions and ways of life associated with the act of weaving, a medium whose practitioners work without a preliminary sketch and where they construct figure and ground simultaneously. T. Lanceta understands weaving as a primordial human code that has brought her into contact with the cultures of various groups – such as the Roma and Moroccan nomadic weavers – artistic traditions and ways of life, with which she has conducted a dialogue through her tapestries, paintings, drawings and theoretical work.

In 1985, T. Lanceta read a monograph about Moroccan folk traditions in weaving. Fascinated by the visuals and the links with her own work and interests, she decided to write to the author, Bert Flint, a Dutch collector and self-taught cultural anthropologist living in Marrakech. That was the beginning of a friendship leading to extended visits to a stretch of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, where she got to know communities and women weavers and learned from their ancestral knowledge, both for its own sake and to nourish her own production. Their work involves themes, rules and customs transmitted from generation to generation that, paradoxically, offers a great deal of expressive and creative freedom. She was fascinated by the formal experiments and cultural content, the way in which it plaits together a community, and the fact that it is considered the outcome of collective creativity instead of individual genius. The tapestries transcend their functionality to enter the realm of symbolism. Ojos [Eyes, 1988] combines an original cushion cover of the kind made by communities in this part of Morocco near the Sahara Desert with two woven pieces by the artist, thus producing a dialogue and a novel compositional ensemble. Ojos is infused with the dynamism and movement of a deliberately irregular rhombus, a diamond-shaped figure propitious for exploring the conception of repetition with variation.

Teresa Lanceta has had individual exhibitions at the Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària in Barcelona (1989), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2000), the Ville des Arts in Casablanca (2000), Bilbao’s Azkuna Zentroa Alhóndiga (2016) and Barcelona’s Palau de la Virreina (2017-2018). Her work has been shown in biennales in Cairo (2009), São Paulo (2014) and Venice (2017). It is also represented in the collections held by the Museo Reina Sofía, the Fundación Beckmann in Tequila, Mexico, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and the MACBA in Barcelona.