Lisbeth Karline Poulsen is a multidisciplinary Kalaaleq artist who was born in Nanortalik, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and currently lives in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat.
From 2003 to 2004 Poulsen attended postsecondary school at the Art School in Nuuk, where she was introduced to several mediums: sculpture, painting, printmaking, and etching. She continued her education at Aarhus Art Academy, concentrating on sculpture and portrait painting before branching out to other mediums. “Sometimes I go with an idea and then I find a solution for it, and sometimes it’s the material that goes with it,” [1] Poulsen explains as her inspiration for her work. In 2012 Poulsen became a member of KIMIK, the Association of Artists in Greenland, which helped her develop her practice and form friendships with other artists.
Her work tends to address the complex nature of identity, women’s rights and gender roles, and Kalaallit representation. “If we want to take out the exotification of who we are, as Greenlandic people…I feel like we are also obliged to portray ourselves,” Poulsen says.
Poulsen learned how to bead for her project Whiteout (2014), which included an all-white Kalaallit national costume. She continued her beadwork practice with the work Inunngorsimanngitsut (The Unborn) (2025), which she made in response to the Danish government forcing contraception on thousands of Kalaallit women and girls in the 1960s to ’90s. The piece is composed of strands of forty-three thousand red beads that represent the potential lives lost due to the forced IUD campaigns.
A more recent medium for Poulsen is clay. She had dabbled in ceramics as a teenager, but her first major clay project was Nakkutilliisut (The Guardians) (2024), a large-scale relief that depicts Nuliajuk. She is mostly self-taught in this medium, but she did receive some guidance from ceramic artists and KIMIK members Kristine Spore Kreutzmann and Lena Augusta Olsen, who helped her with firing and glazing.
Her 2026 solo exhibition Hybrid at the Katuaq Culture Centre of Greenland in Nuuk features beaded work, acrylic painting, and ceramics. The show includes several landscape paintings of the Danish countryside. “They’re [the paintings] kind of representing my first memories of where I’m from,” she says. “I’m Danish and Greenlandic, and I kind of want to embrace both.”
Poulsen’s work has been part of several group exhibitions, including Qillaniq (2026) at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, ON, and Inside Voices Outside Light (2026) at Scandinavia House museum in New York City, as well as solo exhibitions Hybrid (2026) at Katuaq in Nuuk and Fisker-I, Fangeren, Frisørenilu (The Fisher, the Hunter, and the Hairdresser) (2023) at the Ilulissat Art Museum and Greenlandic House in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Poulsen appreciates her art practice as a steady, “constant companion,” but she doesn’t focus on it full time. “I think it’s very important for me knowing that I don’t need to be 100 percent committed to earn from my art…I think it would end up killing me, because then it would be for the purpose of paying the bills,” she says. So she works in theatre and film, costuming, illustration, and events, which also provide an important social outlet for Poulsen. “Being an artist is so lonely,” she says. She hopes to continue exhibiting her work around the world and representing Kalaallit art. “We need to come out of our convenient shell we sometimes have. We do a lot of great art, but it does stay in the country.”