Dorothea Prühl was born in Breslau in 1937. After the upheavals of war, which she experienced as a refugee, she spent her later childhood and adolescence in a small Brandenburg village. At nineteen, she began to study art at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle. A one-year practical internship enabled her to acquire the necessary crafts skills. In 1962 she completed her studies by taking a diploma. Her professional career began with a stint as a designer at a state-owned concern. Taking up an offer of a teaching post at Burg Giebichenstein, she returned to Halle in 1966. Together with Renate Heintze, she worked towards a new training concept, that – defying prescribed orientations towards design and without preconceptions about what constituted artworks – focused on the one-off work. In 1974, the jewellery class at the school was consolidated as an independent course of study. Dorothea Prühl was director of the class from 1994 as a professor appointed by the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle until she retired in 2002. She lives and works in Halle on the Saale and Augustenberg in Mecklenburg.