Ioana Nemes studied photography with Iosif Kiraly at the National Academy for Arts in Bucharest. She had to stop her former carrier as a handballplayer after a knee accident and became an artist. Next to her artistic work she was part of the artist collective Apparatus 22, the fashion collective Rozalb de Mura and the design collaborative Liste Noire.
Her works were shown at the Fridericaneum in Kassel (2006), the Prague Biennial (2007), the Istanbul Biennial (2009) and the Secession in Vienna (2010).