Hanne Tierney’s first public performance was at The Kitchen in 1980, followed by performances at Franklin Furnace, Queen's Museum, Whitney Museum, Sidney Biennale, Espace Kiron, Paris, and the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin. She was invited by the director at the time, Tom Messer, to perform Maeterlinck’s The Intruder at the Guggenheim Museum in 1986. Hanne began working on more extensive productions incorporating live music, vocalists and visual artists. Between 1988 and 1995 she constructed and performed A Play Called Not and Now by Gertrude Stein, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Incidental Pieces for Satin and Strings. These productions were presented by the Wadsworth Atheneum, PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, as well as by puppetry and theater festivals in Germany, Holland and Poland. Soon following this she began her on-going collaborations with light designer Trevor Brown and musician/composer Jane Wang. In 1996, Hanne Tierney was commissioned by BAM to perform Flatland by E. Abbott for the Next Wave Artists in Action series, followed soon after by performances at Bitef, International Theater Festival in Belgrade in 1997. She also presented work at the Jim Henson Festival of International Puppet Theater in 1991,1994, 2000, and created and performed four original pieces at FiveMyles since 2002. In 2008 she performed Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet reproduction for the Toy Theater Festival at St. Ann's Warehouse.
Hanne Tierney had a position as a visiting artist at the Boston Museum School in 1987 and 1997.
Grants received: National Endowment for the Arts 1990, 1992, 2003; Fund for US Artists 1990, Artlink 1994; Mid-career grant Jerome Foundation 2000; Jim Henson Foundation 1995, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005; New York State Council on the Arts 2003, New York Foundation for the Arts 2007; OBIE 2000; Unima Citations for Excellence Awards 1992, 1993, 1996, 2000, 2006.
Hanne Tierney is currently the Artistic Director for FiveMyles, a performance and exhibition space in Brooklyn, founded in 1999.